Bio

Jennifer Reeser is the author of seven books of poetry, including An Alabaster Flask, winner of the Word Press First Book Prize, which former Paris Review editor, X.J. Kennedy, said "...ought to have been a candidate for a Pulitzer." Her book, Sonnets from the Dark Lady was a finalist for the Donald Justice Prize, a collection which revolved around a series written in Elizabethan style, as a woman's answer to the Dark Lady sonnets of William Shakespeare. Her novel-in-verse, The Lalaurie Horror, debuted at #1 on Amazon's Epic Best Sellers list and remained on bestseller lists for three years. Her book Indigenous received Best Poetry Book of 2019 from the Englewood Review of Books. Publishers Weekly called its sequel, Strong Feather, "...an excellent collection...full of artistry and meaning." 

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Her work has appeared in numerous anthologies, including The Hudson Review's seminal Poets Translate Poets, Longman's college textbook, An Introduction to Poetry, and Christian Poetry in America Since 1940, winner of the 2023 Christianity Book Award — Culture & The Arts. Her work is featured in Random House London's Everyman's Library series. Emily Wilson, translator of Homer’s Odyssey and Iliad, has selected her work for Best Literary Translations 2027, published by Deep Vellum. 

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Her translations, literary reviews, and original poetry and fiction have appeared widely in magazines and journals throughout the world, including POETRY (Chicago), The Hudson Review (New York City), RATTLE (Los Angeles), Recours Au Poeme (Paris), The Dark Horse (Scotland), Hrafnhoh (Wales), Candelabrum (England), SALT (Australia) and FirstThings. Her translations of Russian poet, Anna Akhmatova, are approved by Akhmatova's heir and authorized by Akhmatova's agency in Moscow. Pulitzer Prize winner Robert Olen Butler gave her first writing award at the age of seventeen, for prose fiction. Alien Buddha has featured her literary horror as part of its ongoing anthology series and her detective series, The Walkingstick Mysteries, debuts November 2026 at the English journal, The Hunsbury Review, published under the byline J.D. Reeser. 

 

A mentor and seminar leader at the West Chester University Poetry Conference, she has also served as a manuscript consultant for the University of St. Thomas in Houston, conducted private conferences with MFA students under Dr. John Wood at McNeese State University, spoken by special invitation at Tulane University, and lectured at Rehumanize International’s conference at Loyola University New Orleans. 

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Her new collection, The River Will Carry Her Sorrow, is forthcoming from Able Muse Press. She has been nominated seven times for the Pushcart Prize and is a three-time winner of Rattle’s Poets Respond prize. She has received the New England Award and the Lyric Memorial Prize from The Lyric, and has been featured at the Poetry Foundation website, Goodreads, and Verse Daily. Former Poetry Society president Dr. Alfred Dorn honored her with the Innovative Form Award from the World Order of Narrative and Formalist Poets for her invention of the Cretic Hymn. She is  biracial, of British and American-Indian ancestry. She lives with her husband, artist and fiction writer Jason Reeser, along with their two huge hounds, dividing her time between their estate in Gulf Coastal Louisiana and a home on Cherokee reservation land in Indian Country, Oklahoma.