Jennifer Reeser is the author of five collections of poetry. Her first, An Alabaster Flask, was the winner of the Word Press First Book Prize. X. J. Kennedy wrote that her debut “ought to have been a candidate for a Pulitzer.” Her third, Sonnets from the Dark Lady and Other Poems, was a finalist for the Donald Justice Prize. Her fourth, The Lalaurie Horror,debuted as an Amazon bestseller in the category of Epic Poetry.
Reeser’s poems, reviews, and translations of Russian, French, along with the Cherokee and various Native American Indian languages, have appeared in POETRY, Rattle,the Hudson Review, Recours au Poème, LIGHT Quarterly, the Formalist,the Dark Horse, SALT, Able Muse, and elsewhere. Her poetry has been anthologized in Random House London’s Everyman’s Library Series, in Longman’s Introduction to Poetry, in the Hudson Review’s historic Poets Translate Poets, and in others.
A biracial writer of Anglo-Celtic and Native American Indian ancestry, Reeser was born in Louisiana. She studied English at McNeese State University in Lake Charles, Louisiana, and also in Tulsa, Oklahoma, her former home.
Reeser is the former assistant editor of Iambs & Trochees, as well as a former moderator, manuscript consultant, and mentor with the West Chester Poetry Conference.
Reeser’s translations of the Russian poet Anna Akhmatova are approved by Akhmatova’s living heir, and authorized by her agents in Moscow.
Reeser received her first writing award from the Pulitzer Prize winner, Robert Olen Butler, while in high school. She has received the Poets Respond Prize from Rattle, the Innovative Form Award from the World Order of Narrative and Formalist Poets, as well as the Lyric Memorial Prize and the New England Prize. Reeser’s work has been nominated seven times for the Pushcart Prize, and numerous times for the Best of the Net anthology; and her work has been set to music by the classical/art song composer, Lori Laitman, for her tribute to writer Edna St. Vincent Millay. Reeser’s poems have been translated into Urdu, Hindi, Persian, and Czech.
