Jennifer Moxley

Poet Jennifer Moxley was born and raised in San Diego. She studied at the University of California, San Diego; the University of Rhode Island, where she completed her BA; and Brown University, where she earned an MFA.

Moxley’s poems combine lyric and innovative looks at daily life while interrogating societal comfort. Reviewing Clampdown for the Nation, poet Ange Mlinko noted, “Moxley’s ethical anxieties emanate from a central unease, unease at home, and ripple out to touch nation, earth and cosmos. But . . . Moxley does not sublimate her psychology and social perspective.”

Moxley is the author of numerous collections of poetry, including Imagination Verses (1996), Often Capital (2005), The Line (2007), Clampdown (2009) and Druthers (2018). She has also written a memoir, The Middle Room (2007) and a book of essays, There Are Things We Live Among (2012).

Her poem “Behind the Orbits” was included by Robert Creeley in The Best American Poetry (2002). In 2005 she was granted the Lynda Hull Poetry Award from Denver Quarterly. Her 2014 book, The Open Secret, was awarded the Poetry Society of America’s William Carlos Williams award and was a finalist for the Kingsley Tufts Poetry Prize.

Moxley’s poems have been included in the anthologies Vanishing Points: New Modernist Poems (2004); American Hybrid: A Norton Anthology of New Poetry (2009), and Postmodern American Poetry: A Norton Anthology (2013).

A translator from the French, Moxley has translated Jacqueline Risset’s collection of poetry, The Translation Begins (1996), and essays, Sleep’s Powers (2008), as well as Anne Portugal’s Absolute bob (2010).

Since 2001, she has taught poetry and poetics at the University of Maine.