Leah Bodine Drake (December 22, 1904 – November 21, 1964) was an American poet, editor and critic. Biography Leah Bodine Drake was born in Chanute, Kansas, in 1904. Her father was the oilman Thomas Hulbert Drake. According to the jacket material of her A Hornbook for Witches, "her choice of the macabre in poetry comes naturally, for her earliest memories include the tremendous silences of the Navajo country, the woods and swamps of the deep South, and tales of 'ha'nts' told by Aunt Coopie, a negro member of the household". Also, according to this jacket material, her "ancestral background is English, Irish, Welsh, and French, and the family-tree includes Sir Francis Drake, Davy Crockett, and Jean Bodin, to whom she dedicated A Hornbook for Witches. She attended Oakhurst School for Girls Cincinnati, Hamilton College for Women and Sayre College in Lexington, Kentucky. She briefly worked as a Billy Rose dancer in a revue at the Fort Worth, Texas Centennial Exposition in 1936-37. By then she was a published poet; her first poem for Weird Tales, "In the Shadows", appeared in the October 1935 issue. She was second only to Dorothy Quick in the number of poems she published with that magazine - nearly two dozen. Drake's poems were published in many magazines including the Southern Literary Messenger, The Cornhill Magazine, Weird Tales, Nature, Commonweal, The Arkham Sampler, Country Bard, Wings, Talaria, The Beloit Poetry Journal, The Poetry Chapbook, Silver Star, The New Yorker, The Saturday Evening Post and The Saturday Review. She was also a regular contributor to The Atlantic Monthly. She received many awards from the Poetry Society of America. Drake lived in the Evansville, IndianaTri-State for fifteen years and from 1941 to 1951 was a music and theater critic for the Evansville Courier. She was a member of the Vanderburgh Chapter, Daughters of the American Revolution and a board member of the Evansville Philharmonic Orchestra, for which she also edited the monthly newsletter The Baton. Her "Ballad of the Jabberwock" won the Stephen Vincent Benet Ballad Contest in 1946 and appeared for the first time in print in the anthology Dark of the Moon, edited by August Derleth, along with seven other fantastic poems by Drake. Her first book of poetry A Hornbook for Witches: Poems of Fantasy was published in 1950 by Arkham House. The jacket material of the book gives her main interests apart from poetry