Jennifer Clarvoe came to Kenyon in 1990. She has also taught at Harvard Summer School, Wellesley, Boston University, and in the MFA Program at the University of California at Irvine. At Kenyon, she developed the English department's Emphasis in Creative Writing. Clarvoe teaches poetry workshops, and specializes in modern and contemporary American poetry. She has devised a hybrid course in prosody and poetics, in which students learn to appreciate and analyze the formal strategies of poets spanning the range of the tradition in English through writing exercises of their own. Her first book of poems, Invisible Tender, won the Poets Out Loud Prize, and the prestigious Kate Tufts Discovery Award for "a first or early work of genuine promise." The University of Chicago Press will publish her second book of poems, Counter-Amores, this year. In 2002-2003, Clarvoe was awarded the Rome Prize in Literature by the American Academy of Arts and Letters, which allowed her to spend the year writing at the American Academy in Rome. She has also developed a course in Poetry and the Visual Arts, ranging from Homer's description of the Shield of Achilles, to Keats' "Ode on a Grecian Urn," to John Ashbery's "Self-Portrait in a Convex Mirror."

Education

Ph.D. University of California at Berkeley
B.A. Princeton University

Selected Publications

Counter-Amores, University of Chicago Press, 2011.

"What She Thought," Southwest Review (93.2, Spring 2008)

"In the Nights of Cacophony," POOL (6 (2007)

"Counter-Amores, III.14," rpt. in Conversation Pieces: Poems that Talk to Other Poems, ed. Kurt Brown, Everyman's Library Pocket Poets, 2007.

"'The silences themselves are telling': James McMichael's Capacity," The Cincinnati Review (Summer 2006); reprinted online as the Poetry Daily Prose Feature for the week of June 13-20, 2006.

Invisible Tender, introduction by J.D. McClatchy, Fordham University Press, 2000.

You can hear her podcast interview with Mark Strand for The Kenyon Review at http://www.kenyonreview.org/interviews/strand.php .

You can hear her poem, "Day of Needs," online at Slate (February 19, 2002).

Courses Taught

ENGL 103 Body and Soul
ENGL 201 Introduction to Poetry Writing
ENGL 215 Prosody and Poetics
ENGL 301 Advanced Poetry Writing Workshop
ENGL 317 Poetry and the Visual Arts
ENGL 385 Modern American Poetry
ENGL 387 Contemporary American Poetry