Jenny Factor
Current City, State, Country
Birth City, State, Country
Biography
Jenny Factor’s new collection, Want, the Lake (Red Hen Press) explores themes of motherhood and desire. Her first collection, Unraveling at the Name (Copper Canyon Press), won a Hayden Carruth Award and was a finalist for the Lambda Literary Award. Robin Becker praises Jenn’s “experimental, lyrical intelligence” and Alicia Ostriker singles out her “precise …attention to the myriad truths and touchings of…childhood, motherhood, freedom, captivity….a shimmering lighthouse of desire.” Since her first publication in the Paris Review in 2000, Factor’s poems and reviews have appeared in more than a dozen anthologies, including Poetry 180 and The Best American Erotic Poems (Scribner, 2008). Her work has been supported by an Astraea Grant in poetry. Her academic research focuses on early Americana, literary games, and women’s poetry circulation networks. Jenny serves as Lecturer in Poetry at Caltech, and is a former core faculty member and frequent visitor to the MFA in Creative Writing program at Antioch University Los Angeles, where she still strongly supports the program’s dual emphasis on literature and social justice.
What is the relationship between Judaism and/or Jewish culture and your poetry?
Jewish lesbian poets, including Jewish secular humanist poets of any number and various colors of shimmering gender and orientation, along with philosophies and passions and life histories, have always been among my strongest poetic influences. In 2007, I began reading Yehuda Amichai’s Open Closed Open, as translated by Chana Bloch and Chana Kronfeld. I read the poems very carefully, thinking about how the poems seemed to tell stories in parts and sections and philosophical refractions. And I began to imagine what formal innovations and documentary techniques might look like applied to themes of parenthood, nature, and desire. In a sense, that is how my first poems for Want, the Lake began. Midrash and Torah study were/are very important parts of my life. And so Midrash became an echo running through the set of poems I created on that formal prompt, poems in a shape that in essence, “essai”, in the French sense, to test or try (out such themes). And although I’ve long been a poet who has enjoyed writing in received verse forms (and I am a great admirer of Marilyn Hacker’s poetry and virtuosity), the Judaic phrasings of psalm and anaphora often work their way into what I write. So, essentially, Jewish rhythms and Jewish sounds are a part of who I am. So yes, absolutely.
Published Works
Want, the Lake (Red Hen Press, 2024)
Unraveling at the Name (Copper Canyon Press, 2002)
Author Site
Links to Sample Works
Current Title
Education
Harvard College
Brandeis University
Bennington Writing Seminars