Originally from Birmingham, Alabama, Jessica received her B.A. summa cum laude in English and Comparative Literature: Language Theory from SUNY Buffalo, where she participated in the Poetics Program, started the poetry magazine name, and won the Academy of American Poets Prize twice. After completing a Master’s in Comparative Literature with a thesis entitled “Sonic Territories: Deleuze and the Politics of Sound in Kafka and Duras” (directed by Henry Sussman), Jessica lived in Sweden, Germany and Austria on a series of scholarships from 2003-2005. Jessica has now resettled in Buffalo, a city Robert Creeley called “the last place you can be Bohemian.” She is currently studying toward the Master of Library Science degree and teaching writing at SUNY Buffalo.
Jessica is the author of one full-length collection of poetry, Organic Furniture Cellar (Outside Voices/Bootstrap Productions 2006). Since 2001, her work has been published in American Weddings, Anomaly, Antennae, apocryphaltext, Area Sneaks, Big Game Review, The Buffalo News, Cannibal, dANDelion, Drill, ecopoetics, Ferrum Wheel, Filling Station, FOURSQUARE, Issue 1, Issue 2, ixnay, Knives Out, Literature Compass, Mantis, name, OEI (in Swedish), The Other Herald, Outlet, Phoebe, Queen Street Quarterly, Rock Heals, rout/e, Serving Suggestion, Small Press Traffic, Small Town, speechless, WOMB, xtant, and Zinhar (in Turkish), as well as in anthologies Face Time (Cy Gist Press) and A Sing Economy (Flim Forum). Her poetry and poetics have been translated into Turkish, Swedish, Icelandic, Arabic and Danish. Chapbooks include bird-book (Detumescence), The Plasticity of Poetry and Telling Time (No Press), Shifting Landscapes (above/ground press), butterflies (Big Game Books) and What the Fortune-Teller Said (dusie/a+bend press) . Her work has also been set to music and movement several times, most recently in the opera Ursularia by Nicholas DeMaison (see “Collaborations” for stills from musicartmovement and Transient Views); her three-dimensional “poetry plastique” has been exhibited in the U.S. and Europe in shows like infusoria. Much of Jessica’s work can be accessed online at looktouch.com.
Jessica is known as an editor for her work with name and the monthly women’s broadzine Foursquare, which was recently on view at the Handmade/Homemade exhibit of small press publishing. She has plans to publish a series of chapbooks. She is the editor of Outside Voices Press, which recently released its second monograph, Ric Royer’s The Weather Not The Weather.
