Frances Ruley Karttunen reads her work, "Cherry-tree poem."

Frances Ruley Karttunen is an American academic linguist, Nantucket historian and author. She received her BA in 1964 from Harvard and her PhD in 1970 from Indiana University.
She is the author of The Other Islanders: People Who Pulled Nantucket’s Oars (2005) and other nonfiction.
A small collection of her poems, not including this one, were published in 1980 and one poem published in 1983.