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. In her course on Prosody and Poetics, 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. In her course on Poetry and the Visual Arts, students study the ekphrastic tradition 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." 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." Her second book of poems, Counter-Amores, was published by The University of Chicago Press. 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. In the fall of 2010, as Director of the Kenyon in Rome Program, she returned to Rome with twenty Kenyon students for a semester of study and travel.

Education

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

Selected Publications

Counter-Amores, University of Chicago Press, 2011.

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

"What She Thought," Southwest Review (93.2, Spring 2008); Reprinted online by Verse Daily.

"Mi Ritrovai," Best American Poetry Blog (December 28, 2009)

"Moving Images" (a review of The Apple Trees at Olema: New and Selected Poems, by Robert Hass), in The Cincinnati Review, 8.2 (Winter 2012). Also featured as the Poetry Daily Prose 2/7/2012 - 2/20/2012.

"T. S. Eliot and the Short Long Poem," in A Companion to Poetic Genre, ed. Erik Martiny, (Wiley-Blackwell, Winter 2011). Online at Online Library.

"Half-Lives and Vanishing Points: Carpaccio's 'Hunting on the Lagoon,'" Southwest Review. (April 2010) (Winner of the McGinnis Ritchie Award for Nonfiction).

You can hear her reading at the Hammer Museum (November 10, 2011).

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

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

Kenyon in Rome

Winner of the Rome Prize in Literature, Clarvoe has written, studied, and taught in that city. Most recently, she returned as Director of the Kenyon in Rome program. You can see photos of this trip on the program's Facebook page.