Jenny Sadre-Orafai makes the tales of bloodlines fresh and the wild earth new.
wendy c. ortiz
Jenny Sadre-Orafai is the author of Paper Cotton Leather, Malak, Dear Outsiders and the co-author of Book of Levitations.
books
About
Jenny Sadre-Orafai is the author of four poetry collections. A new edition of Malak, her second poetry collection, will be published by the University of Akron Press in 2024. Her prose has appeared in The Rumpus, Fourteen Hills, The Los Angeles Review, The Collagist, and others. She co-founded and co-edits Josephine Quarterly and teaches and mentors creative writers.
many selves
poet & Writer
Jenny writes poetry and creative non-fiction and her work has appeared in literary journals and anthologies. She’s at work on a book of essays.
Teacher
Jenny has taught writing for 21 years and has served as a mentor in the AWP’s Writer to Writer Mentorship Program and as a part of the Periplus Collective.
Editor
Jenny was the poetry editor at JMWW and New South before co-founding Josephine Quarterly in 2012 with poet Komal Mathew.
press
✦
“In Paper Cotton Leather, many unimportant things—unimportant only in a past where they were uninteresting—suddenly become like small leitmotifs for trouble and loss.”
⏤ Hannah Rodabaugh in PANK
✧
“Filled with both the ordinary—trampolines, moths, roadkill, and the underwire of bras—and the occult power of witchcraft and ritual, this collection is alive with the unexpected and the charmed.”
⏤ Eliza Browning in Sundress
✧
“That we can name the truth as such even in its unknowability, that we can comprehend languages we don’t speak, that there are languages that exist outside of utterance—these notions exist comfortably and beautifully beside one another in Malak.”
⏤ Paige Sullivan in The Bind
✦
“All of the nouns that readers have read before in poems or novels regarding magic or spirituality or darkness are forgotten as Sadre-Orafai depicts a brand new otherworldly alphabet.”
⏤ Jennifer MacBain-Stephens in Agape
selected writing
+ Three poems in Poetry is currency
+ two poems in the rupture
+ Essay in The Vida Review
+ writers recommend in poets & writers
+ In their own words at the poetry society of america
+ short story in nelle
Contact
Book Jenny for a reading or a workshop. Or reach out to tell her you agree that Michael Keaton was the best Batman this world has ever had. Or just say hey.
Even though, as Sadre-Orafai writes, “water isn’t easy to read,” reading or rather swimming through this book might be what saves you. I was willing to become “even more animal” spending time with these poems. Are you?
Alison C. Rollins