B. 1977

Charles Jensen was born in Eagle, Wisconsin, and earned an MFA from Arizona State University. His full-length poetry collection, First Risk (2009), was a finalist for the 2010 Lambda Literary Award. He is also the author of the chapbooks The Strange Case of Maribel Dixon (2007); Living Things (2006), winner of the Frank O’Hara Chapbook Award; and Little Burning Edens (2005). The City of Los Angeles Department of Cultural Affairs designated him a 2019–2020 Cultural Trailblazer, and his honors include the 2018 Zócalo Poetry Prize and a Dorothy Sargent Rosenberg Prize.

The poems in Jensen’s The First Risk are influenced by a variety of subjects, including art, film, and mythology. Over four extended sequences, Jensen writes of the murder of Matthew Shepard, the films of Pedro Almodóvar and Alfred Hitchcock, the painter Luca Cambiaso, and the myth of Venus and Adonis.

Former director of the Writer’s Center in Bethesda, Maryland, he is the founding editor of LOCUSPOINT, an online journal of poetry. Charles Jensen currently lives in Los Angeles, where he directs the Writers’ Program at UCLA Extension.