JEANANN VERLEE is an author, performance poet, editor, activist and former punk rocker who collects tattoos and winks at boys. Her work has been published and is forthcoming in a variety of journals, including The New York Quarterly, Rattle, FRiGG, kill author, and PANK, among others. Her poems have also been anthologized in publications such as Not A Muse: The Inner Lives of Women and His Rib: Poems Stories and Essays by Her. Verlee’s first full-length book of poems, Racing Hummingbirds, earned the Independent Publisher Book Award Silver Medal in Poetry. Verlee has twice been nominated for a Pushcart Prize. She has served as editor for an array of authors, and is Poetry Editor for Union Station Magazine and the forthcoming Poets Portrait Project Anthology.
Verlee has represented New York City five times at the National Poetry Slam under two of the most highly-regarded poetry performance series in the nation: Urbana Poetry Slam and The louderARTS Project. Verlee was the highest-scoring individual poet at the 2008 National Poetry Slam Finals, was the 2009 NYC-Urbana iWPS Champion, and represented NYC-louderARTS at the 2010 Women of the World Poetry Slam. She is director of the Urbana Poetry Slam reading series at the Bowery Poetry Club, and serves as writing and performance coach for this three-time NPS Championship venue. She has performed and facilitated workshops at schools, theatres, bookstores, dive bars and poetry venues across North America.
Educated in theatre performance and creative writing, Verlee was co-author and performing member of national touring company, The Vortex: Conflict, Power, and Choice!, has been commissioned by universities for a number of guerrilla theatre events spotlighting domestic violence under MSCD’s Theatre for Social Change, and was a charter member of New York City’s annual Spoken Word Almanac Project. A fan of letter-writing campaigns and constructing protest signs, Verlee is also an ardent animal rights and humanitarian activist who has organized and participated in numerous social actions.
Her first poem was drafted in pencil on the inside cover of a collection of Grimm’s Fairy Tales at the age of seven. She won her first writing contest for a short story at the age of eleven and in the same year became the youngest recipient of Parade Magazine’s Young American Ambassadors prize for an essay contest. Hoping to echo S.E. Hinton’s young author milestone, Verlee was determined to write a novel by the age of sixteen. With three drafts completed by the autumn of her fifteenth year, she almost reached her goal. Instead, however, found herself blindsided by the insurmountable distraction of tattooed boys, dying her mohawk pink, and a life-altering diagnosis of bipolar disorder. A hardcopy of the unfinished manuscript remains in a fireproof safe in her studio apartment.
She lives in New York City with her best pal (a rescue pup named Callisto) and a pair of origami lovebirds. She believes in you.
REVIEWS of RACING HUMMINGBIRDS by Jeanann Verlee
by Adam Henry Carriere for Danse Macabre
by John Hancock and Katie Moore for The Legendary
by Marc Schuster for Small Press Reviews
by JoSelle Vanderhooft for The Pedestal Magazine
INTERVIEWS with Jeanann Verlee
OVS Magazine
Poetry Interview: Jeanann Verlee
PANK
Ask The Author, Jeanann Verlee
HTML GIANT
Roxane Gay, I Like ___ A Lot: I Like Jeanann Verlee A Lot
WE WHO ARE ABOUT TO DIE
Getting to know: Jeanann Verlee
PRESS
Boston Poetry Examiner
Jeanann Verlee delivers explosive show in Cambridge
The Boston Phoenix
Review: Boston vs. NYC Slam Poetry Grudge Match at the Armory
The Economist
Adversity in verse
The New Gay
Poetry: Three Queer YouTube Poems for Friday
Praise for “Racing Hummingbirds” (Write Bloody Publishing, 2010):
“Fierce and formidable, Jeanann Verlee is poised to make an indelible mark – much like a razor slashing silk – on what's become a comfortably placid poetic landscape. Her unflinching and uncompromising stanzas will change the way you move through the world.”
— Patricia Smith, Author of Blood Dazzler and Teahouse of the Almighty and four-time Individual National Poetry Slam champion
“If risk is the main ingredient of a true masterpiece than Verlee's Racing Hummingbirds claims the title of masterpiece countless times with both poise & puncture, poem after poem in this stampede of a debut collection. Divvied up into five fingers that ball into this book-fist: Lullaby, Metanoia, Butcher, Fireflies, & Lullaby Reprise, each section grants a particular space for the reader to bask, gallop, shiver, soar, & head-bang, depending on the poem. I want to become a teacher just so I can make this required reading. I want to anonymously mail copies of it to anyone I've ever wanted to kiss. I want to wallpaper my bedroom with the pages of this book.”
— Angel Nafis, Staff Pick: Greenlight Book Store, Brooklyn
“To describe Jeanann Verlee as a poet with a dark history of regret and risky weaknesses would be to miss the spare beauty with which she manages to revise that history and the playful way she can celebrate—even forgive—frailty. The poems in Racing Hummingbirds may all be redheads, but they have more tattoos than you might think. And all those pretty rings will only make it hurt more when curled into a fist.”
— Taylor Mali, four-time National Poetry Slam champion and author of The Last Time As We Are
Further praise for chapbooks, performance & workshops:
“Any storyteller can recount powerful experience. Jeanann makes you feel something powerful is happening in the telling. It is when safety dissolves that we discover possibility. She’s dangerous. It’s a special person that will make you wish they were your villain.”
— Brian S. Ellis, Author of Uncontrolled Experiments in Freedom
“Jeanann Verlee is an American woman. She is growing up and she's not always pleased about it. She's the skin-kneed girl at a carnival bug-eyed and in awe of everything around her, but the colors she reports, and the tales she tells of what she's seen there and how she's survived it all, are at once lurid and gorgeous. Excavating the worlds of mental illness, unrepentant sex and drug use, has seldom seemed both so visceral and lovely. She draws you into her imaginings and her several unrelenting pains, and through them the poems emerge as risky covenants of survival. They will heal and break you down. They will exalt everything in you.”
— Roger Bonair-Agard, Author of Tarnish and Masquerade, Two-time National Poetry Slam Champion, Artistic Director of The louderARTS Project
“Verlee took two encores to thunderous cheering and applause. Many of them seemed to have been waiting all night to hear the last poem in her setlist, ‘[u]nsolicited advice to adolescent girls with crooked teeth and pink hair,’ and they were not disappointed… by the time Verlee delivered the final line, ‘When your mother hits you, do not strike back,’ most of the audience was on their feet.”
— Cassandra DeAlba, Boston Poetry Examiner
“As a Writing Workshop teacher, I often speak with my students about writing from the heart, working with complicated material, and the need for deep revision, but no amount of telling can compare to the showing that Jeanann Verlee's visit to our school accomplished...”
— Emily Moore, Educator, Stuyvesant High School English Department
“There are writers that provoke a spark and voices that burn down the building altogether. Both are necessary in the war of words. This woman on fire leaves foundations splintered, smoking and bare. She personifies courage and makes pain look beautiful in its startling color of truth.”
— Mahogany L. Browne, SlamMistress of the Nuyorican Poets Café, Owner of PoetCD.com, Publisher of Penmanship Books
“Jeanann is an amazing writer and performance poet who captures one's core condition by italicizing what it is to be human.”
— Bruce George, Co-founder of Def Poetry JAM, Activist, Writer, Poet, Speaker
“Coming from the non-slam side of poetry it was refreshing to see a facilitator who not only helped with performance but also helped with the content of the page.”
— Thomas Fucaloro, Workshop Participant, Poet, Pharmacist
“She makes you want to write better poems. And almost inevitably when you work with her, you do.”
— Jaime Martin, Workshop Participant, Poet
“Sure, any girl can grow up to be Jeanann – but only if she knows words for the blades they are, and only if she wields them fiercely.”
— Patricia Smith, Author of Blood Dazzler and Teahouse of the Almighty and four-time Individual National Poetry Slam champion
“Fucking genius.”
— Anonymous, YouTube.com
