Elizabeth Jacobson

Elizabeth Jacobson’s second book, Not into the Blossoms and Not into the Air, won the New Measure Poetry Prize, selected by Marianne Boruch (Free Verse Editions/Parlor Press, 2019).   About this collection Boruch says: This wild, remarkable book begins in painstaking definition, via what isn't— to strange and dazzling discoveries of the natural world, to instinct and melancholia and surprise. This poet wanders through a range of poetic architecture— an eight-sectioned poem which begins with a woman removing her body parts, epistolary poems, prose poems, small strange lyrics of love and bewilderment. Genuine curiosity fuels this book and (can we bear it?) a true savoring of the world. Elizabeth Jacobson starts in clarity and ends in mystery, two points of imaginative departure. Beware and rejoice: this is how a very original brain thinks itself into poems. Jacobson is also the author of Her Knees Pulled In(Tres Chicas Books), and two chapbooks, A Brown StoneandAre the Children Make Believe?, both from Dancing Girl Press. Her work has appeared in the American Poetry Review, Hinchas de Poesia, On The Seawall, Orion Magazine, Ploughshares, Plume, Poet Lore, The American Journal of Poetry, Terrain, Vox Populi, Women's Studies, and others. She is the founding director of the WingSpan Poetry Project, a not-for-profit which conducts poetry classes in shelter facilities in New Mexico. WingSpan has received three grants from the Witter Bynner Foundation.  Elizabeth is the recipient of the Mountain West Writers' Award from Western Humanities Review, The Jim Sagel Prize for Poetry from Puerto del Sol, a grant from New Mexico Literary Arts and has received residencies from Key West Literary Seminar, Atlantic Center for the Arts, Mable Dodge Luhan House where she was the 2018 writer-in-residence, and Herekeke Arts Center.  She has an MFA from Columbia University.  www.elizabethjacobson.wordpress.com