Jenny George
Visiting Poet
“My job,” poet Jenny George declared in a recent interview, “is the human job of waiting and listening, and language is just what poets use—like wind chimes—to catch the sound of the larger, more essential thing. Wind chimes themselves are not the point. The point is the wind.” That patient waiting and listening results in meticulously honed poems that Pulitzer Prize-winning poet Rita Dove has praised for their “exquisitely spare meditation.”
Poetry Northwest described Jenny George’s most recent collection After Image (Copper Canyon, 2024) as “intense and controlled and delicate, a study of character and narrative.” George investigates the line between life and death: “And in the space / left behind—” Jenny George is also the author of The Dream of Reason (Copper Canyon, 2018), Asterisk: Poems (Bull City Press, 2023), and co-author with Matt Donovan of We Are Not Where We Are (Bull City Press, 2025), an erasure of Thoreau’s Walden.
She has been the recipient of numerous awards, including a “Discovery” / Boston Review Poetry Prize, and fellowships from the Dorothy Sargent Rosenberg Fund, the MacDowell Colony, the Bread Loaf Writers’ Conference and Yaddo. Her work has appeared in Beloit Poetry Journal, Ploughshares, Narrative, Cimarron Review, and The Collagist, among others. George holds an M.F.A. from the Iowa Writers’ Workshop and lives in Santa Fe, New Mexico, where she serves as program coordinator for the Hidden Leaf Foundation, a Buddhist-based social justice organization.
George will read at Leo Weinstein Auditorium in Wright Hall on Tuesday, April 1, 2025 at 7 p.m. A livestream will be available on the BDPC YouTube page.