Biography Louis Jenkins
Louis Jenkins’ poems have been published in a number of literary magazines and anthologies, including The Best American Poetry 1999 (Scribner, 1999) and Great American Prose Poems (Scribner, 2003). His books of poetry include An Almost Human Gesture (1987), All Tangled Up With the Living (1991), Nice Fish: New and Selected Prose Poems(1995), winner of the Minnesota Book Award, Just Above Water(1997), The Winter Road(2000) and Sea Smoke(2004). His most recent books are North of the Cities (2007), European Shoes (2008) and Before You Know It: Prose Poems 1970-2005(2009) all published by Will o’ the Wisp Books. Mr. Jenkins was awarded two Bush Foundation Fellowships for poetry, a Loft-McKnight fellowship, and was the 2000 George Morrison Award winner. Louis Jenkins has read his poetry on A Prairie Home Companion and was a featured poet at the Geraldine R. Dodge Poetry Festival in 1996 and at the Aldeburgh Poetry Festival, Aldeburgh, England in 2007.
Louis Jenkins is one of the contemporary masters of the prose poem. Born in Oklahoma, Jenkins has lived in Duluth, Minnesota, for over 30 years, and his work is regularly featured on the radio show A Prairie Home Companion. His brief, accessible prose poems use humor, wry observation, and hypothesis to tease out the absurdity of everyday situations. In his poems, Jenkins maintains a tight focus on the mundane particularities of ordinary existence, using deliberately flat language to comic and often heartbreaking effect.
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