A native of 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. Jessica has now resettled in Buffalo, a city Robert Creeley called “the last place you can be Bohemian.” She recently finished a Master of Library Science degree while teaching writing at SUNY Buffalo; she currently works as the Head Librarian at a private boarding school.
Jessica is the author of one full-length collection of poetry, Organic Furniture Cellar (Outside Voices/Bootstrap Productions 2006). 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, Kadar Koli, 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 or are being translated into Turkish, Swedish, Icelandic, Arabic and Danish.
Chapbooks include bird-book (Blue Moon Press 2001, House Press 2002, Detumescence 2006), The Plasticity of Poetry and Telling Time (No Press 2006), Shifting Landscapes (above/ground press 2006), butterflies (Big Game Books 2006) and What the Fortune-Teller Said (a+bend press 2009).
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 Europe in shows like zaoem and infusoria. Much of this 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 exhibited at Handmade/Homemade and WNYBAC’s “Wide Margins” zine exhibit. She is the editor of Outside Voices Press, publisher of Ric Royer‘s The Weather Not The Weather and Alixandra Bamford‘s Nearest the Mouth and re-publisher of Charles Bernstein and Susan Bee’s The Nude Formalism.
Jessica Smith
