Jonterri Gadson

Jonterri Gadson earned her MFA from the University of Virginia and is a graduate of the Callaloo Creative Writing Workshop. She is the author of the chapbooks Interruptions (2014) and Pepper Girl (2012). Her full-length poetry collection, Blues Triumphant (2016), explores the triumphs and demands of motherhood and identity. In an interview with the Rumpus, Gadson explained the impulse behind the book: “I wrote most of these poems by forcing myself to stay awake after I completed my son’s lengthy bed time rituals with him. I would force myself to write for two hours. I had so much anxiety that I was failing … failing him, failing myself so I would honestly ask myself, ‘What am I most afraid to say?’ and then I would write poems about what I wouldn’t want anyone to hear me saying out loud.”

Gadson is the recipient of scholarships and fellowships from Cave Canem, the Bread Loaf Writers’ Conference, the University of Dayton, and the University of Virginia. As an assistant professor at Bloomfield College, she codirected the workshop series, Writing from the Margins. Gadson also writes for an all-female comedy panel show; in 2016 she was selected for the NBC Late Night Writer’s Workshop.