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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.

Friday, April 15, 2011

Poem for Weekend... Forty Lashes


Forty Lashes

On the night I fled the church before the performance
I threw my music down in the parking lot and drove off
in the truck, to the quiet dark along the river.Someone 
had pulled a switch blade from beneath her vestments


And tried to cut out my tongue.  But she bruised her own hands 
on the keys of the vast organ towering at the back of the nave 
and the choir roiled in like striped smoke, taking its place.   
It was Lent.  The Cross was on its side draped in black netting. 


It was the time of weeping. Punctured, repudiated, I shattered away 
like a breaking plate to the bridge over the river and wondered 
if my friend who lives there year on year at a small campsite had died.  
No flames in the rippling dark.  But I am a veteran of flight—unlicensed.  


I lift off at the sign of trouble, and came back on fire to avenge  
the misdeeds of the babbling peri-menopausal choir,  the red-faced  
priest with the gum of rectitude in his mouth who holds the Gospel 
according to Himself over his head. Gestures signifying drama 


Sans lux perpetua.  The agnus dei dripping with blood,  stigmata 
on the wrists of the fresco angels. Before, I bowed my head 
in the serene light from the stained glass and the priest said 
I was forgiven.  But he said before the day is out you’ll sin again.


Thank you. I am sin incarnate, I often think, when I see that 
I am being observed from the safety of trees near the border.  
I was thrown down a flight of stairs.  I was kicked into a corner,
my hip shattered.  I was fed to the roiling dogs in the backyard 


That were eating each other.  You don’t know what it was.  
You can’t think of it.  But then if you are singing in a choir 
hoping to become  a pain-free  angel and then excoriated, 
cast out, falling down through the air of your own soul blamed, 


Then as Lucifer was, blamed for the Fall of Man—if the church 
is named for the Healer and you went down into the water 
cupping your hands to take the Host like everyone not knowing 
you were hated and feared, if another priest said you don’t believe 


You’re loved because you aren’t and if it was proven that night 
of the Rheinberger Requiem you had rehearsed, wood-shedded, 
reaching out to the about to be widowed other soprano next to you, 
the Chippewa who had the heart attack and couldn’t sing above 


A whisper and then were cast out,  blamed and scapegoated 
would you do as I, rising up and blowing fire over 
the sanctimonious there, flaying the hypocrites with your lash?

April 15, 2011

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copyright Jenne' R. Andrews 2011
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1 comment:

Claudia said...

tight write jenne..church should be a place for the ones who need healing but unfortunately in some of the churches you feel more sick after the visit or even almost dead...luckily not in all though..

April 17, 2011 at 6:09 AM

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