Bio
Jennifer Handy is the recipient of a Pearl Hogrefe Fellowship (2025-2026). She holds a PhD from The University of Tulsa, where she was a Bellwether Fellow, and is the author of the poetry chapbooks California Burning (Bottlecap Press, 2024) and Dirt (Finishing Line Press, forthcoming in 2025).
Her poetry has been published or is forthcoming in Interim, The Ilanot Review, Voices, Watershed Review, Sagebrush Review, HeartWood Literary Magazine, Wild Roof Journal, and elsewhere. Her fiction has appeared in The Examined Life Journal, Flyway: A Journal of Writing and Environment, Great River Review, MAI: Feminism and Visual Culture, SHIFT, Twisted Vine Literary Arts Journal, The Windhover, and elsewhere. She was longlisted in the 2024 Frontier Poetry Nature & Place Prize as well as for the 2024 Frontier Poetry Open. She was a finalist in the New American Press’s MAYDAY Microchapbook Contest, the Emerald Coast Writers Chapbook Contest, and the Porter House Review’s Editor’s Choice Contest. Her poetry won 2nd prize in the annual Poetry Week Contest held by CommuterLit and received Honorable Mention in the 2024 Wil Mills Chapbook Award at West Chester University as well as in the 2025 ZO Magazine’s Decennalia Poetry Expo.
She has only recently returned to civilization after camping (and writing) in some of the remotest areas of the western United States. You can read her recent poems about post-modern polar bears online at The Dewdrop, The Ilanot Review, and the Palimpsest issue of Interim.
The Dewdrop: http://www.thedewdrop.org/2024/11/24/Jennifer-handy-the-loss-of-the-bear/ The Illanot Review: http://www.ilanotreview.com/translation-and-transition/poems-jennifer-handy/ Interim: https://www.interimpoetics.org/palimpsests-jennifer-handy