Jennifer Grotz
Assistant Professor of English
MFA Indiana University
PhD University of Houston
(585) 275-4092, 513 Morey Hall
Poetry, creative writing, translation
Research/Writing interests
Jennifer Grotz’s most recent book of poems, Cusp, is informed by the phrase entre chien et loup, between dog and wolf, which is a French colloquialism for twilight. It signifies a brief instant in the blue light of dusk when the dog, who roams during the day, is about to retreat and when the wolf, who roams at night, just begins to come out. Cusp is a book about being in a kind of middleness, and it is also a book that aims to locate itself in terms of a literary tradition. The longest poem in the book, “Arrival in Rome,” for instance, is an imitation of Keats’s “Ode to a Nightingale” and grapples with the anxiety of influence as a young woman poet. While the poems in Cusp portray the world as divided, the poetic project of the book is to locate a cusp, a “now” moment between past and future, between domestic and foreign, between the random and the inevitable. Her current manuscript of poems, currently titled The Needle, explores both Polish and American twentieth-century poetry and its traditions. She is also completing a manuscript of translations of contemporary Psalms from the French poet Patrice de La Tour du Pin.
Selected publications
-
Cusp, Houghton Mifflin 2003
-
Not Body (letterpress chapbook), Urban Editions 2001
- Poems published in journals and anthologies such as New England Review, Kenyon Review, Ploughshares, Tri-Quarterly, American Poetry Review, Poetry Daily, and Best American Poetry 2000 and 2009 (Scribner’s)
- Translations from the French and Polish published in journals and anthologies such as Ploughshares, Poetry International, Tri-Quarterly, Antioch Review, Agni Online, Circumference, and New European Poets (Graywolf Press 2008)
- Essays and reviews published in journals and newspapers such as Virginia Quarterly Review, Boston Review, Gulf Coast, Indiana Review, and The Washington Post
Teaching
Courses in poetry writing, modern and contemporary American and European poetry, and the art of translation
Recent courses
- Creative Writing: Poetry (fall 2009)
- Contemporary Poetry (fall 2009)
Honors and activities
- Assistant Director of the Bread Loaf Writers Conference
- Faculty, Warren Wilson MFA Program
- Consulting Poetry Editor, Born Magazine (www.bornmagazine.org)
- Rona Jaffe Foundation Writers' Award
- Writing Fellowship, Camargo Foundation, Cassis, France
- Residency Fellowship, Vermont Studio Center
- New Writing Award, Fellowship of Southern Writers
- Administrative Director, Krakow Poetry Seminar, 2001-2007
- Natalie Ornish Poetry Prize for Best First Book, Texas Institute of Arts and Letters
- Individual Artist Grant, Cultural Arts Council of Houston
- Translation Award, American Translators Association
- Katherine Bakeless Nason Poetry Prize for Cusp, chosen by Yusef Komunyakaa
- Prague Summer Program Fellowship in Poetry
- Individual Artist Fellowship, Oregon Arts Commission
