Bio:
Jennifer Franklin is the author of four poetry collections, including A Fire in Her Brain, selected by Rowan Ricardo Phillips for the Princeton Series of Contemporary Poets (Princeton University Press, 2026). Poems from the collection (epistolary poems to Virginia Woolf, Lucia Joyce, and Sylvia Plath) have been published in American Poetry Review, Bennington Review, “poem-a-day” on poets.org, Poetry Northwest, Prairie Schooner, The 2025 Pushcart Anthology, and the Montreal International Poetry Prize Anthology.
Her work has been commissioned by The Metropolitan Museum of Art, published in The Bedford Guide to Literature (Macmillan, 2024), The Paris Review, The Nation, “poem-a-day” on poets.org, and Poetry Society of America's Poetry in Motion.
Her previous book, If Some God Shakes Your House (Four Way Books, March 2023), was a finalist for the Paterson Prize in Poetry and a finalist for the Julie Suk Award.
She is the recipient of a 2025 Pushcart Prize, and residencies from The Hawthornden Foundation and the T.S. Eliot Foundation for 2026. She was awarded the 2024 Jon Tribble Editing Fellowship from Poetry by the Sea, a 2021 NYFA/City Artist Corps grant for poetry, and a 2021 Cafe Royal Cultural Foundation Literature Award.
Jennifer’s passion is teaching and she has a devoted following of talented students in her manuscript revision workshops on Zoom. Since January of 2020, Jennifer has taught in Manhattanville’s MFA program. She offers private manuscript consultations and teaches craft workshops for The Frost Place, Poets House, and Provincetown Fine Arts Work Center online. She has been a guest teacher at The Metropolitan Museum (April 2025), The Emily Dickinson Museum, Boston Book Fest, Massachusetts Poetry Festival, and over a dozen schools and universities.
She was interviewed for the forthcoming documentary, Poetry is Not a Luxury, along with poets Jane Hirshfield, Joy Harjo, and Marie Howe.
She is cofounder and cohost of Words Like Blades online reading series that amplifies new work by marginalized emerging writers and their mentors. She is coeditor of Braving the Body (Harbor Editions, 2024) and The Big Brutal Act (Harbor Editions, 2026).
More info:
Previous poems from Looming, No Small Gift, and If Some God Shakes Your House have been published in Boston Review, Barrow Street, Beloit, Gettysburg Review, The Nation, The Paris Review, “poem-a-day” from The Academy of American Poets, Poetry Daily, Poetry Society’s “Poetry in Motion,” JAMA, Prairie Schooner, Rhino, and Verse Daily. She has a poem in Invisible Strings: 113 Poets Respond to Songs of Taylor Swift (Ballantine/Random House, December 2024).
Jennifer holds an AB from Brown University and an MFA from Columbia University where she was the Harvey Baker Fellow in her first year and won a Dean’s Fellowship for her second year. At Brown, she studied with Michael S. Harper and C.D Wright. At Columbia, she studied with Lucie Brock-Broido, Lucille Clifton, and Richard Howard. She has also worked with Patricia Smith and Carolyn Forché. For over a decade she taught manuscript revision at the Hudson Valley Writers Center, where she served as Program Director. She lives in New York City with her husband, their daughter, and their rescue pit bull, Dottie!
