“Excuse me, ma’am. Karaoke doesn’t start until 9pm…Ma’am?”

Jennifer is the author of five books of poems: Crushing It (Copper Canyon Press, 2020), Days of Shame & Failure (Bloof Books, 2018), The Mystery of the Hidden Driveway (Bloof Books, 2010), Drunk by Noon (Bloof Books, 2007), and A Gringo Like Me (Bloof Books, 2005).

Known for their dark, imaginative humor, her poems have appeared in publications such as the New Yorker, the American Poetry Review, Granta, McSweeney’s, five times in the Best American Poetry series, and the 2022 Pushcart Prize: Best of the Small Presses anthology. Her nonfiction writing has appeared in the New York Times and Washington Post.

From 2016-2017, she developed and curated the crowd-sourced poetry project, Iowa Bird of Mouth, which was supported by the Iowa Arts Council and the National Endowment for the Arts. Over 750 people from around the world contributed to the project. Currently, she is at work on MYCYOWA, a traveling art project designed to increase awareness of mycoremediation.

Jennifer earned her MFA from New York University. Her honors include three Milwaukee Poetry Slam champion titles, and an Iowa Arts Council Fellowship for her crowdsourced poetry project, Iowa Bird of Mouth, and a grant from the American Rescue Plan and the Iowa Department of Cultural Affairs for MYCYOWA, a traveling public art project about mycoremediation. 

Born in Lancaster, California—home to Frank Zappa, Captain Beefheart, and the Space Shuttle, Jennifer lives in central Iowa where she teaches in an ongoing series of private creative writing classes online and is the proprietor of a tiny spice company called Saltlickers.

“In the face of ecological meltdown, art gains extra urgency and Jennifer L. Knox is one of our most urgent ecological poets. In the face of the Anthropocene—the geological era in which we are living, when human activity has irreparably damaged the earth—Knox laments our losses and celebrates what we have left. Her creativity—with its obsession with extinction—is driven, like much creativity, by death, but is animated with an unmistakable life force. The humor and sadness in each of her poems invites the reader to mourn what can never be regained, environmentally, and also to make the most of whatever it is that remains.”

—Kathleen Rooney, O, Democracy!