A Memorial Service has been scheduled for "Nina" here are the details.

Memorial Service to be held on Saturday November 15th in the Chapel at M.I.T. at 2:30 PM (Doors will open at 2:00 PM)

48 Massachusetts Avenue, Cambridge, Massachusetts 02139

Virginia "Nina" (Gibbon) Nyhart Obituary

January 16, 1934 – July 27, 2025

Virginia "Nina" (Gibbon) Nyhart, 91, died of heart failure on July 27, 2025, at home in Brookline MA, surrounded by her family. Nina was a lover of language, expressed as much in her ear for grammar as in her pursuit of poetry, which became a prime outlet for her powerful creative drive and sharp wit. These remained with her until the very end.

Born in 1934, the daughter of Samuel Young and Virginia Newbold Gibbon of Jenkintown, PA, she attended Springside School before going to Vassar College, where she majored in philosophy. In 1954 she married John Daniel Nyhart, moving with him to the Boston area after her graduation from Vassar (Phi Beta Kappa) in 1955. After Dan completed his law degree at Harvard, the two traveled with their small children to Africa 1958-60, where Dan had a research project. Upon their return, Dan started working at MIT and the family settled in Brookline.

Nina was a dedicated wife and mother, but she found limited opportunities for creativity in her life as a homemaker. In the late 1960s she found a new outlet in writing poetry, soon engaging with a community of poets in Cambridge around the feminist cooperative Alice James Books, with whom she published two collections of her poetry, Openers (1979) and French for Soldiers (1987). Her poems were published in over a score of literary magazines, including Poetry, Ploughshares, Shenandoah, The Virginia Quarterly Review, and The Ohio Review, as well as in anthologies—most notably as part of the revival of prose poetry in the 1990s. Her awards included, among others, the Poetry Society of America's Consuelo Ford Award for Lyric Poetry and four MacDowell Colony Fellowships.

Long interested in childhood education, she first taught poetry writing to children in the early 1970s in public and private schools (partly under the auspices of the Massachusetts Council on the Arts and Humanities), later holding workshops for other teachers of poetry to children as well as adult poetry writing classes, at the Radcliffe Institute, Cambridge Center for Adult Education, and elsewhere. In 1978, she co-authored The Poetry Connection: An Anthology of Contemporary Poems with Ideas to Stimulate Children's Writing, with her close friend Kinereth Gensler.

Nina had warm relationships with fellow poets, family friends in Brookline, and friends and relatives on Mount Desert Island, Maine, where she cherished spending time at her family's cabin each summer throughout her life. She enjoyed the variety of those friendships and their wide-ranging intellectual, social, and familial characters. In her last few years, she took special interest in the lives of her grandchildren and first great-grandchild.

Nina is survived by her brother, Samuel Y. Gibbon, Jr. (Carol); three children, Nick (Kathleen McTigue), Lynn (Tom Broman), and Andrew (Angie Hurlbut); grandchildren Sam, Tim, Hannah, Maris, Laura, Noah, and Caleb; and great-grandchild Lenora. The family would like to thank the talented and loving caregivers who made the last few years of Nina's life at home another engaging chapter. Plans for a memorial service will be announced at a later date through Bell-O'Dea Funeral Home. In lieu of flowers, donations in the memory of Nina may be made to the Southwest Harbor Public Library.