Jenny Browne

Photo courtesy of the poet

Jenny Browne is the author of four collections: Fellow Travelers: New and Selected Poems (2019), Dear Stranger (2014), The Second Reason (2007), and At Once (2003). She earned her MFA from the James Michener Center for Writers at the University of Texas in Austin. She served concurrent terms as City of San Antonio Poet Laureate (2016-18) and Poet Laureate of the State of Texas (2018) and in 2020 was Distinguished Fulbright Scholar in Creative Writing at the Seamus Heaney Centre, Queens University, in Belfast, Northern Ireland. Other awards include a National Endowment for the Arts Fellowship in Poetry and the Cecil Hemley Award from the Poetry Society of America.

Writing in the Believer, Stephanie Burt says this about Browne's work: "set beside contemporaries whose poems consist largely of alienated critique, Browne stands out for her ordinary affection; set beside more populist writers who proclaim their ordinariness, she stands out (and evades sentimentality) because her reactions to her life remain so strange. … Her poems retain the unpredictability not of a roulette wheel or a supernova, but of a quirky, wise friend in another city, one whose reactions surprise us even once we know her enough to trust her well." In the introduction to Browne's New and Selected Poems, Naomi Shihab Nye praised Browne's vivid depictions of place and the strangeness of both life and language, "Her exuberant poems, rich with definite cadences, deep curiosities, and multi-layered textures, voices, and personalities, feel like wake-up calls. As if they say, Here is this life I find myself in, which fascinates and confounds me. Have we paid enough attention lately? Crisscrossing energies echo the fields of voices we live among. Who are we in this company?"

Browne teaches at Trinity University in San Antonio