Author and teacher Jennifer Perrine has been writing poetry since their college days. Every few years, when they’ve accumulated around a hundred poems, they sift through them to find common themes and ideas, what they call “the connective tissue.” From this process, Perrine selects 50 to 60 poems for a new collection. Their first book, The Body Is No Machine, was published in 2007, featuring a selection of poems, some of which had been previously published.
Since then, Perrine has published three more collections: In the Human Zoo in 2011, No Confession, No Mass in 2015, and Again in 2020. The latter began as a project where they wrote one poem a day for the first 100 days of Donald Trump’s presidency. This year, Perrine is set to release a new collection titled Beautiful Outlaw, which can be pre-ordered through Kelsey Street Press, a Berkeley-based publisher founded in 1974 to publish work by women who have been marginalized in the literary world.
If you’re in Yamhill County, you can get a sneak peek of Perrine’s new work when they visit on Thursday, April 10, for a reading at the McMinnville Public Library. The event begins at 6 p.m. and is free and open to the public.
Beautiful Outlaw was awarded the 2023 QTBIPOC Prize from Kelsey Street Press, an honor given to feminist writers and poets who identify as QTBIPOC. The collection, according to Ching-In Chen, the 2023 judge, explores “the devastating effects of violence during a time of genocide and mass incarceration,” urging readers to confront their own complicity.
Perrine was born in New Jersey and studied religion, culture, and creative arts at Susquehanna University. They earned an MA in English from Bucknell University and a PhD in English from Florida State University. A two-time recipient of the Arts and Culture Diversity and Inclusion Awards from the Asian American Journalists Association, Perrine’s work has been widely published in both print and online literary journals, as well as in anthologies like Essential Queer Voices of U.S. Poetry (Green Linden Press, 2024) and Cascadia Field Guide: Art, Ecology, Poetry (Mountaineers Books, 2023).
Now residing in Portland, Perrine co-hosts the Incite: Queer Writers Read series at Literary Arts. They also work as the equity and racial justice program manager at Metro’s Parks and Nature Department in Portland, where they teach writing to various groups, including students, incarcerated individuals, military veterans and their families, healthcare workers, and LGBTQIA+ communities.
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