Jenny Johnson is the author of In Full Velvet, published by Sarabande Books in 2017.
In both their lyrical force and breathtaking formal sophistication, her poems are powerful meditations on love, the body, queer culture and identity, vulnerability and community. Featured in both the New York Times and by the Academy of American Poets In Full Velvet was one of the most highly praised collections of 2017.
Johnson’s honors include a 2015 Whiting Award and a 2016-17 Hodder Fellowship at Princeton University. She has also received awards and scholarships from the Blue Mountain Center, Bread Loaf Writer’s Conference, Virginia Center for the Creative Arts, and Yaddo. Her poems have appeared in Los Angeles Review of Books Quarterly, New England Review, Troubling the Line: Trans and Genderqueer Poetry and Poetics, and elsewhere.
After earning a BA/MT in English Education from the University of Virginia, she taught public school for several years in San Francisco, and spent ten summers on the staff of the UVA Young Writer’s Workshop. She earned her MFA in Poetry from Warren Wilson College. A contributing editor at Waxwing Literary Journal, she teaches at the University of Pittsburgh and at the Rainier Writing Workshop, Pacific Lutheran University’s low-residency MFA program.
