Bio
Jennifer Handy was the recipient of a Pearl Hogrefe Fellowship for 2025-2026. She holds a PhD in English from The University of Tulsa, where she was a Bellwether Fellow. She is the author of the poetry chapbooks “California Burning” (Bottlecap Press), “Dirt” (Finishing Line Press), and “Huswifery & Higher Math” (Dancing Girl Press). Her two full-length collections are “A Child Cries in Levittown” (Finishing Line Press) and “This Is Not a Polar Bear: A Study in Postmodern Extinction” (Fernwood Press, forthcoming in 2027).
Her poetry has been published in Interim, Tar River Poetry, The Ilanot Review, Voices, Watershed Review, Novus Literary Arts Journal, HeartWood Literary Magazine, Wild Roof Journal, and elsewhere. Her fiction has appeared in EcoTheo Review, The Examined Life Journal, Flyway: A Journal of Writing and Environment, Great River Review, MAI: Feminism and Visual Culture, SHIFT, and elsewhere. Her scholarly work focuses on American literature and has appeared in Style, TETYC, and World Literature Today. She has a particular interest in writing poetry that responds to the work of American authors, which has appeared or is forthcoming in The Nathaniel Hawthorne Review, The Wallace Stevens Journal, Poe Studies, and The Edgar Allan Poe Review.
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.