Jennifer Blackburn

Jennifer Blackburn is the Program & Outreach coordinator for the Boutelle-Day Poetry Center at Smith College, where she works to support and develop poetry initiatives across the college and in the wider community of Western MA. Recent initiatives have included the Blackout Poetry Project with Design Thinking Initiative; an annual field trip to bring high school students to campus to experience a poetry reading with a nationally-recognized poet; and work with Sylvia Plath’s drafts in collaborations with Special Collections and the Imaging Center. Her writing appears widely (as Jen Jabaily-Blackburn) in a number of publications, including The Common, Massachusetts Review, Villain Era, swamp pink, SIR, Palette Poetry, Salamander, Fugue, Banshee, On the Seawall and Couplet Poetry, and her poems have twice been included in Best New Poets. In 2024, she was the winner of the Louisa Solano Emerging Poets Prize. She is the author of an e-chapbook, Disambiguation (Salamander/Suffolk University, 2024) and her first full-length book of poems, Girl in a Bear Suit, the winner of the 2023 Elixir Press Annual Poetry Prize, was released in 2024.