Poet Jennifer Hambrick is the six-time Pushcart Prize- and Best of the Net-nominated author of the free verse poetry collection In the High Weeds, winner of the Stevens Manuscript Award of the National Federation of State Poetry Societies; the acclaimed 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 also 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.); 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, and in many international competitions.

Hundreds of Jennifer’s poems appear in 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, Oyster River Pages, 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 will present 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 will be presented as a multi-panel contribution to the exhibition “the Language of Creativity,” September – October 2021, at the Dublin Arts Council Gallery.

Jennifer’s poem “Circles Against the Spin” was set to music by composer and former Wexner Center Fellow Dr. Mark Lomax, and premiered by CODE New Music Ensemble as part of The Big SCORE, a poetry and music commissioning project of the Johnstone Fund for New Music. On commission from the VIVO Music Festival, Jennifer penned the poem “on a cold sea we travel” in response to Arnold Schoenberg’s pivotal chamber music work Transfigured Night, and updating the poem by German poet Richard Dehmel that originally inspired Schoenberg’s composition. Composer Jacob Reed’s orchestral song setting of Jennifer’s poem “Thorn Tree” was premiered by the McConnell Arts Center Chamber Orchestra as part of “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.

Joining her work as a writer of free verse poetry, Japanese short-form poetry, 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.

Availability

Upon request