Jena Osman

Jena Osman is an American poet and editor, who graduated from Brown University, and the State University of New York at Buffalo, with a Ph.D. She teaches at Temple University.^[1] Osman's work has appeared in American Letters & Commentary, Conjunctions,^[2] Hambone, Verse, and XCP: Cross-Cultural Poetics.

With Juliana Spahr, she founded and edited Chain. She has been a writing fellow at the MacDowell Colony, the Blue Mountain Center, the Djerassi Foundation, and Chateau de la Napoule. She inspired the start of Hyphen magazine.^[3]

In her ongoing project, "Court Reports," Osman worked directly from court records, judicial opinions bearing the stamp and influence of Charles Reznikoff.^[4]

Awards

• 2009 National Poetry Series
• 2006 Pew Fellowships^[5]
• 1998 Barnard Women Poets Prize
• National Endowment for the Arts grant
• the New York Foundation for the Arts grant
• The Pennsylvania Council on the Arts grant
• Fund for Poetry grant

Works

• The Network. Fence Books. 2010. ISBN 978-1-934200-40-7.
• "flag of my disposition"; "hurrah for positive science", 5 Trope
• "THE PERIODIC TABLE AS ASSEMBLED BY DR. ZHIVAGO, OCULIST", Zhivago, 2002-3
• An Essay in Asterisks. Roof Books. 2004. ISBN 978-1-931824-10-1.
• The Character. Beacon Press. 1999. ISBN 978-0-8070-6848-9.
• Jury. Meow Press. 1996.
• Amblyopia. Avenue B. 1993. ISBN 978-0-939691-09-8.
• Twelve Parts of Her. Burning Deck Press. 1989. ISBN 978-1-886224-48-3.

Anthologies

• The Best American Poetry 2002, (editor: Robert Creeley)^[6]

Reviews

Now we have Jena Osman’s new book, An Essay in Asterisks, which I necessarily read with a more open mind, but I do think this is a much richer book than The Character, more generous in its pleasures. Here she is again probing consciousness and politics and language in a variety of inventive ways. These tricks might be called wordplay but the end is anything but playful.^[7]

References

1. http://etc.temple.edu/English/dbpages/people/OsmanJ.asp
2. http://www.conjunctions.com/conj35.htm
3. http://temple-news.com/2002/10/17/hyphens-mantra/
4. http://www.legalaffairs.org/issues/September-October-2005/review_skeel_sepoct05.msp
5. http://www.pewtrusts.org/news_room_detail.aspx?id=24152
6. http://www.bestamericanpoetry.com/archive/?id=16
7. Kathleen Ossip. "Review of Jena Osman". Verse.

External links

• Jena Osman Website
• "Jena Osman", Penn Sound
• Faculty Homepage at Temple University
• Jena Osman and violist/composer Nadia Sirota interview each other in InDigest