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Professor Jenne' Rodey Andrews, M.F.A., is a highly regarded American poet, critic and memoirist. Recent work has appeared in former Autumn House Publisher Michael Simms' Vox Populi (over fifteen poems) The Passionate Transitory, Belletrist Coterie, The Adirondack Review and elsewhere.

Andrews' current ms of poetry Beautiful Dust was a finalist for the 2014 Autumn House and she recently withdrew the work from Salmon Ltd, Ireland to protest unmoderated bashing of American writers by Irish writers on the press's social media pages.

Her most recent collection, Blackbirds Dance in the Empire of Love, lauded by Robert Bly and endorsed by poets Jim Moore, Dawn Potter and Patricia Kirkpatrick, appeared from Finishing Line Press 2013. A booklength collection Beautiful Dust was 2014 finalist for the Autumn House Press Poetry Prize and solicited by Salmon Press, Ireland. Turning on work set in the West and her native Southwest the collection is under submission to 2019 publication prizes.

Andrews is currently hard at work on two new memoirs: The Shame Garden: A Woman Writes of Isolation, Despair and Self-Redemption, which in intensely wrought and imagistic prose poetry chronicles the anatomy of shame; it is the poet's late-in-life tour d'force, sending the reader through Dante's circles of hell, the sewers of Paris ala Les Mis, mano a mano confrontations with the Alien mater familias, fusing literary and vintage cinematic works in an elliptical dance with human history and experience of being Other. The poet has no idea of what will become of this work but hopes it finds a home as memoir with a small press.

A four part interview with Andrews went live at poet Maureen Doallas's blog Writing without Paper in 2010.

Other collections include the full-length Reunion, Lynx House Press, The Dark Animal of Liberty, Leaping Mountain Press, and In Pursuit of the Family, edited and published by Robert Bly and the Minnesota Writers Publishing House.

Her work has been anthologized in Heartland II, Northern Illinois University Press, 25 Minnesota Vols. I and II, Wingbone: An Anthology of Colorado Poetry, Women Poets of the Twin Cities, Oil and Water and Other Things that Don't Mix, and elsewhere.

Essays have appeared in MPR's Magazine, The Colorado Review, The Twin Falls Times News, and miscellaneous journals.

IIt is Prof. Andrews' belief that one's collection of poetry must be judged on the quality of its craft, voice, and language, not its themes.


With Mr. Bly the memoirist Patricia Hampl wrote a forward to her first collection and is considered the "mother" of the modern American memoir although she arguably shares this title with Mary Karr for Karr's The Liar's Club. Andrews mentored Karr in Minneapolis when the former was circa 19.

Professor Andrews has had an illustrious teaching career at Colorado State University and the University of Colorado where she taught prelaw students in the making of argument and the issues-oriented seminar The American West. She was the highest rated instructor in the University Writing program during her tenure at Boulder.

Currently Professor Andrews writes daily at age 70, having been rendered housebound in 2007 in a fall from a horse, at home with her lover and companion of thirty years the fiction writer Jack Brooks, ten new poems a month, and is working on an additional memoir about her pioneer roots, "Territory Fever: The Story of an Albuquerque Family," posted as chapters are finished to Loquaciously Yours where the poet has produced over 450 essays in the past decade on a variety of topics as well as book reviews. Upcoming: a review of Ethna McKiernan's new Salmon Collection.

Ms. Andrews is also a Civil Rights Advocate advocating in 2019 for the civil rights of the poet Ping Wang who recently won the AWP Award for Memoir.

In 2015, after a long battle, Andrews extracted her MFA in Creative Writing/Poetry from Colorado State University, begun and finished in the 80's, self-advocating under the Americans with Disabilities Act. In fact Andrews was instrumental in the Colorado Commission on Higher Education's approval of the MFA at CSU.

She is a literary fellow of the National Endowment for the Arts, the Minnesota Arts Board Fellowship, was short-listed for a Bush Foundation Fellowship, and was full-time Poet in Residence for the St. Paul Schools from '74-78.

She lived in St. Paul from 1971-78 during the first wave of the Twin Cities literary renaissance, one of the first poets to inaugurate The Loft Literary Center, co-founding Women Poets of the Twin Cities which as noted boosted the careers of Mary Karr, Ethna McKiernan and others, and spent the summer of 1973 in Reggio Calabria, Italy which gave rise to the "voluptuous prose-poetry" memoir Nightfall in Verona posted in entirety here, designated by arts maven and former friend Caroline Marshall of NPR The Writer Reads as "fabulous."

Circa 2010 Andrews also founded a poetry group on She Writes which included Dawn Potter, Katha Pollock and other noteworthy writers, and supported the work of Meg Waite Clayton, fiction writer in addition to mentoring a number of other up and coming writers.

There is no way to estimate the influence on the lives and work of the some 12,000 students k-12 she met and encouraged in the seventies, but the poet James Tolan has attributed his career to her work as it was anthologized in Heartland II, Lucien Stryk, Editor. Professor Stryk read the title poem of In Pursuit of the Family on NPR.

As noted the poet lives in northern Colorado's Poudre River Valley with her husband, fiction writer Jack Brooks; the couple's daily life is centered around writing and enjoying their beautiful imported Golden Retrievers;-- see the Ardorgold website for details. Contact: jenneandrews2010@gmail.com.

Signed copies of the Blackbirds Dance collection, endorsed by James Moore, Patricia Kirkpatrick and Dawn Potter, are available from the poet. She posts new work below and is available for mentorship and virtual readings via Skype.

She is happy to critique ms. of poetry, fiction and memoir for a small fee.

Thursday, December 30, 2010

Poem for December 29-- Challenge....

All of you have me addicted to these challenges...  as it turned out I liked Robert Lee Brewer's at Writer's Digest Today-- to write a "last chance" poem-- what a great idea!  It would be great to brainstorm from that prompt and then dig in but I had just come from a pathology lab and so.....




Speci-Mental

Perhaps it was my last chance
To be civil, handing my labor of necessity
The materia dolorosa produced by my body
Sequestered with a small wooden paddle
Into a sterile cup at midnight
And guarded with my life down the snow-pack
To the blond tech preening in her purse
Thinking about going down on her boyfriend
On their lunch break.
.
Perhaps I had over-lipsticked my mouth
So that when I said “God damn it”
Tripping on the way in to the place
Those words hit the air like a velvet red
Smoke ring
From the mouth of a Greta Garbo
Making all of the phlebotomists nervous
So that they missed a vein or two.

This might be my last chance
To tell you, sweeties
How much I hated to trek home
With that chemistry set you gave me
A spoonful of poo here a spoonful there
Shake to an emulsion for the leukoctyes,
The clostridium and wait
And cogitate
And think not of my over the top white count,
The versions of leukemia I could have
But make the white snow-falling day
Count: read, write, sing.

Barbarella the Tech
purses her pink little mouth at me
And whips out the clear plastic cup
Into which in that one-eyed imagined
Clarity of having lurched to the loo
In the dark, I have carefully placed
a dollop of my offal

And says
You did it wrong; it doesn’t
Conform to the cup.
They’ll just throw it out.

I button my red lips and look out at the snow.
Half-formed epithets escaping
from my throat like steam
From a semi veering down an ice-packed
Mountain road.
And you didn’t tell me to hold off
On the Immodium so that I could bring you
Something that conforms not to itself
But its container?

I lean forward, looking at those long blond
Oh-so-like everyone else's locks.
I came out in a walker in the snow
To bring you what you asked for.
This is your last chance to tell me
That you will put what I brought you
Under a microscope and identify
What’s camped out in it.  Your very last chance
Before, as a charter nonconformist
Who’s lived in this dive for fifty years
I  deposit a new specimen here, on the rug
That is a map of Africa spilling over its borders
Out into the Universe.

Copyright Jenne' R. Andrews 2010
All Rights Reserved

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2 comments:

Anonymous said...

Oh my word, Jenne, this is a hoot, especially the ending, lol. ~p

December 30, 2010 at 5:46 PM
Maureen said...

Noone who follows Robert and takes up this prompt could possibly compete with this... on any level. You certainly have the "last word".

December 30, 2010 at 7:45 PM

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