Jennifer Maier was born in Oak Harbor, Washington, and raised in the Pacific Northwest, California, and along the Mississippi Gulf Coast. She holds baccalaureate degrees in neuropsychology and English from the University of Washington and a Ph. D. in American Literature from Tulane University.
Since she began writing poetry in the late 1990s, her work has received many honors and awards, most recently, a Walter Dakin Fellowship from The University of the South, the 2012 Emily Dickinson Prize from the Academy of American Poets, and a 2013 Visiting Artist Residency at The American Academy in Rome. Her poems have appeared widely in literary journals, including Poetry, American Poet, Plume, The Gettysburg Review, New Letters, The Southern Humanities Review, and Image, as well as on National Public Radio and other print and broadcast media.
Her debut collection, Dark Alphabet (Southern Illinois UP), was named one of “Ten Remarkable Books of 2006” by the Academy of American Poets and was a finalist for the 2008 Poets’ Prize. Her second collection, Now, Now, was published in 2013 by the University of Pittsburgh Press. A third volume, The Occupant is expected in 2021.
Jennifer Maier has given readings at many universities and cultural centers in the US and Europe and has lectured widely on the subject of poetry, both as craft and as literature. From 2007-2018 she served as associate editor for the arts quarterly Image. She is currently a professor of modern literature and poetics, as well as Writer in Residence, at Seattle Pacific University, where she also serves on the faculty of the university’s MFA program. Every other summer she leads an intensive, month-long study course in creative writing and literature in Rome, Italy.
“What a rare joy it is to linger in the lucid, transcendent worlds of Jennifer Maier’s poems. In taut, precise language and lapidary images, Now, Now explores myriad pathways of connection, the ways desire, longing, and imaginative possibility brush up against the everyday, revealing a keen, fiercely compassionate intelligence—a sensibility so finely attuned and so clearly in love with the world that you would follow it almost anywhere.”