Jennifer Hambrick

A poet hailed for her “brilliant” imagery, “masterful” craftsmanship, and “uniquely musical voice,” Jennifer Hambrick brings to her work as an Ohio Arts Council Teaching Artist a broad range of teaching experiences with learners of all ages and from all backgrounds and a genuine love of inspiring others to share their stories in the written word. Joining her work as a writer of free verse and prose poetry, haiku, haibun, and non-fiction prose, Jennifer joyfully shares the beauty of poetry with writers of all ages in learning experiences that honor every writer’s unique voice and empower individual expression.

Jennifer Hambrick is the six-time Pushcart Prize- and Best of the Net-nominated author of the poetry collections a silence or two (Red Moon Press), winner of a Merit Book Award from the Haiku Society of America and acclaimed as “a stunning collection … destined to become a haiku classic;” In the High Weeds, winner of the Stevens Manuscript Award of the National Federation of State Poetry Societies; the haibun collection Joyride (Red Moon Press), winner of the Marianne Bluger Book Award from Haiku Canada; and the free verse poetry collection Unscathed (NightBallet Press). Jennifer was featured by former U.S. Poet Laureate Ted Kooser in his newspaper and online column, American Life in Poetry; was appointed the inaugural Artist-in-Residence at historic Bryn Du Mansion, Granville, OH; and has received many other awards for her work, including from Tokyo’s NHK World TV, the National League of American Pen Women, the Haiku Society of America, and the Ohio Poetry Association. She won the 2020 Sheila-Na-Gig Press Poetry Prize, First Place in the 2018 Haibun Award Competition of the Haiku Society of America, and First Place in the 2021 Martin Lucas Haiku Award Competition (U.K.); four First Place honors and a Special Award in the inaugural Heliosparrow Haiku Frontier Awards (2024), and others. Hundreds of Jennifer’s poems appear in Rattle, The Columbia Review, The American Journal of Poetry, Chiron Review, the Santa Clara Review, The Main Street Rag, POEM, The San Pedro River Review, Maryland Literary Review, Third Wednesday, Mad River Review, Modern Haiku, The Haibun Journal, Frogpond, the major Japanese newspapers The Asahi Shimbun and The Mainichi, and many other literary journals and invited anthologies.

The recipient of many poetry commissions, Jennifer Hambrick is currently at work on a commission as poet laureate of the Worthington Chamber Orchestra’s 20-25-26 season. Jennifer presented a new cycle of poems as poet laureate of the 75th-anniversary season of the world-class Chamber Music Columbus concert series (2022-23). On commission from the Johnstone Fund for New Music and the Sunday at Central concert series, Jennifer penned a new set of poems to accompany Antonio Vivaldi’s baroque masterpiece The Four Seasons, and performed the poems in a September 2019 concert featuring the concertmasters of the Columbus Symphony Orchestra as soloists. Those poems, “The Four Seasons According to Her,” have been hand calligraphed by the noted calligrapher Ann Alaia Woods and illustrated by visual artist Evangelia Philippidis, and were presented as a multi-panel contribution to the exhibition “The Language of Creativity,” September – October 2021, at the Dublin Arts Council Gallery.

Other commissions and interdisciplinary collaborations The Big SCORE, a poetry and music commissioning project of the Johnstone Fund for New Music; “The Poet’s Song,” a poetry commissioning project supported by the McConnell Arts Center, the Worthington Education Foundation, and the Johnstone Fund for New Music; and a commission from the VIVO Music Festival, resulting Jennifer’s poem “on a cold sea we travel” in response to Arnold Schoenberg’s pivotal chamber music work Transfigured Night.

Availability

Upon request

RECENT PROJECTS: “Write Your Own Garden: A Summer Haiku Workshop” – part of the Japanese Garden Festival at Dawes Arboretum in Newark, Ohio. Shared the joy of writing haiku, covering important points about the aesthetics and form of the genre by way of exploring and discussing examples of published haiku in English. Informed by this exploration, participants wrote their own haiku and shared them aloud in lively and engaging readings.

Program Chair: 2023 Haiku North America conference at the Mercantile Library of Cincinnati and the Hilton Netherland Plaza.

(forthcoming) “Found in Translation: The Kon Nichi Translation Group, Gendai Haiku, and the Rise of Avant-Garde Haiku in English,” to be published in The Haiku Foundation’s journal Juxtapositions.