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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.

Monday, September 1, 2014

Recent Poem: Faultlines


This translation is a compromise between my own, done with the help of a translation program, and that of Sr. Marco Giuffrida.  Watch for his in full.  The original and English version of the poem appear below it.  Thank you.

Questa traduzione è un compromesso tra la mia, fatta con l'aiuto di un programma di traduzione, e quella Signore Marco Giuffrida. Guarda per il suo intero. La versione originale e in inglese del poema appare sotto di esso. Grazie.

La Frattura

Sputa la pioggia,
è dopo, del radio, avviso di tempesta.
Adesso qualcosa che ho fatto e venduto
comincia a incrinarsi,
frantumarsi, allargarsi

come colei che osservo nello specchio
nelle acque vorticose della notte.

E adesso, che le ragazze nigeriane
non sono tornate alle famiglie.
Così, ora vi sono linee di faglia, fratture,
in molti cuori.

ii

Chi può riparare a tutto questo.
quale prodotto straordinario
per uso domestico
che riempie tutte le incrinature.

Che vaso di decoupage colla,
lo progettato sembra un’ craqueleur-

Cosa propinquità e di decenza,
quale vicinanza o opportunità,
o segretario di Stato
o dottrina antica vieta la guerra?

 iii

Questi cose frantumati, si allontanano
l’un l’altro,
nonostante la loro archiviazione lucida
o polvere di vetro--
.
Ciò che non dovrebbe accadere, ma accade…

Che non posso spiegare io stesso per me.
Che la nostra affiliazione è inspiegabile
dopo la frammentazione delle anni domestici.

Che qualcuno che conosco
Che vive vicino al fiume
or’ va su una bicicletta nel diluvio
con cappello fradicio,
il suo cagnolino affamato
trotto di lato.


iv

Queste sono le cose che aderiscono a me
ed a voi, queste cose
che rubano la nostra attenzione:

Come al crepuscolo,
un libro di un amico
si cade aperto
alle pagine giallo e disintegrano:

dove le sue parole salgono
come nebbia ed entrano in me
dalla ombre frammentazione
della scatola archivio.


Inglese/English

Fault Lines

Spitting rain, a tornado warning.
Something I made and sold
suddenly begins to crack, peel,
fall apart--

like she whom I behold
in the bathroom mirror
in the eddying waters of night.

That the Nigerian girls
have not been returned
so that there are now fault lines
in many hearts.

ii

Who can repair any of this,
what remarkable product
for wide household use
that fills all cracks.
What pot of decoupage glue,
itself designed to intimate
craqueleur--

What propinquity or propriety,
what secretary of state,
or fading doctrine
against war?

iii

These things cracking, peeling,
pulling away from each other,
despite their archival gloss, or
dust-coated glass--

That which should not, yet does:

That I cannot explain myself
to myself.
That our affiliation
is inexplicable
after the splintering
household years.

That there is someone I know
riding by on a bike
in a sodden hat
with a trotting pitbull at side,
that these two live in all weather
on the river flat.

iv

These are the things that adhere to me,
to you,
that claim our attention,

how a friend’s book falls open at dusk
to yellow and disintegrate pages,
where his words then rise like mist
and enter me
from the fragmented shadows
of the archive box.


copyright Jenne' R. Andrews 2014  jenneandrews2010@gmail.com .
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