Faculty

Jennifer Firestone is the author of five books of poetry, most recently Story by Ugly Duckling Presse, five chapbooks, and has co-edited two anthologies, including one forthcoming from MIT Press, Other Influences: An Untold History of Feminist Avant-Garde Poetry, which is based on her course, Feminist Avant-garde Poetics.

Firestone writes serial poems that interrogate ideas of indeterminacy, subjectivity, and the construction, use and performance of language. Her interest in the lyric and sonics informs her aesthetic and philosophy of the fragment, rupture, slipperiness, and ambiguity as being the closest indicatives of “real” life. Firestone writes not to resolve but to deepen the questions at hand and sometimes even the confusion.

In her courses, Firestone uses experiments, play and collaboration to expand definitions of “poetry.” For her, process is as central as the finished poem and community as valued as much as the individual poet.

MFA, Poetry, San Francisco State University

Books:

Story (Ugly Duckling Presse, 2019)

Ten (BlazeVOX [books], 2019)

Gates & Fields (Belladonna*, 2017)

Flashes (Shearsman Books, 2013)

Holiday (Shearsman Books, 2008)

Chapbooks:

Swimming Pool (DoubleCross, 2016)

LITtle by LITtle (Dusie Kollektiv, 2014) in collaboration with Laura Y. Liu

Fanimaly (Dusie Kollectiv, 2013)

Waves (Portable Press at Yo-Yo Labs, 2007)

From Flashes (Sona Books, 2006)

snapshot (Sona Books, 2004)

Anthologies:

Other Influences: An Untold History of Feminist Avant-Garde Poetry (MIT Press, 2024), co-edited with Marcella Durand

Letters To Poets: Conversations About Poetics, Politics, And Community (Saturnalia Books, 2008)

Selected Literary Journals & Anthologies

Poems: Brooklyn Rail, Academy of American Poets, Hyperallergic, Prelude, About Place, Chicago Quarterly, Entropy, Drunken Boat, e-ratio, 580 Split, Boog City, Fourteen Hills, How2, Kindergarde: Avant-Garde Poems, Plays, Stories, & Songs for Children, Poetry Salzburg Review, Ping Pong, Typo and Xcp: Cross Cultural Poetics.

Essays : The Volta, Poetry Northwest, Jacket Magazine, Tarpaulin Sky, Building is a Process/Light is an Element: Essays and Excursions for Myung Mi Kim, Spellbound: The Art of Teaching Poetry: “Undressing Advertisements--Poetry as Feminist Critique through Harryette Mullen’s Trimmings.” .