Jen Jabaily-Blackburn

Jen Jabaily-Blackburn’s first book of poems, Girl in a Bear Suit, was selected by Christopher Citro as winner of the 2023 Elixir Press Annual Poetry Prize and was released in April 2024. She is the winner of the 2nd annual Louisa Solano Memorial Emerging Poet Award from Salamander, selected by Stephanie Burt. Her work has appeared in or is coming soon from SIR, Arkansas International, Palette Poetry, Salamander, Fugue, Banshee, On the Seawall, Couplet Poetry, Indiana Review, The Common, and Massachusetts Review, among others. Her poems have twice been selected for Best New Poets. She is at work on a series of mixed-media pieces, hem, drawn from The Metamorphoses of Ovid. Originally from the Boston area, she now lives in Western Massachusetts with her family. In 2024, she joined the advisory board of Perugia Press, and she is an associate editor of Nine Syllables Press, housed at Smith College, where she is the Program & Outreach coordinator for the Boutelle-Day Poetry Center.