Jennifer Steele (Poetry) | Chicago, IL
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Jennifer Steele, a native of Middletown, CT and current Chicagoan, received her MFA from Columbia College Chicago in 2008. She is the Founder and Executive Director of Revolving Door Arts and a 2015 fellow of the Callaloo Creative Writing Workshop. For 10+ years, she has taught writing and digital arts to hundreds of young people and served as an educator to organizations across Chicago. Her work has appeared in Pittsburgh Poetry Review, Another Chicago Magazine, Callaloo, Columbia Poetry Review, and others.
Books
Blurbs, Press, & Reviews
Jennifer Steele writes while meditating about the interior, the house as well as the relationship between things. Clothes and nature are touched upon, as is food observed in the hands of a mother. Steele’s long poem “House Guest” is the large mirror in the living room. It’s a poem with an extension chord keeping the reader plugged in until the end. “I told you not to love me, like this” are Steele’s words of caution to the reader who reads too fast. A House in its Hunger contains poems with teeth. There is also sadness in this collection which stems from what we leave behind when the doors to our homes lose the keys to love.
—E. Ethelbert Miller, Editor, Poet Lore
Steele is the night watch-woman of the silenced and sublime that live among us. Her spotlight language around the loves, the loneliness, and those hidden places that keep our diary histories, gets released in her aperture of verses. What wasn’t said in those long lost memories gets said, and heard in these beguiling poems.
—Parneshia Jones, Author of Vessel: Poems
