Photo credit: Katie Marya
Jessica Poli is a writer, editor, and educator living in Lincoln, Nebraska. Her debut poetry collection, Red Ocher (University of Arkansas Press), was selected by Patricia Smith as a finalist for the 2023 Miller Williams Poetry Prize. She is the author of four chapbooks, including Canyons (BatCat Press, 2018) and The Egg Mistress, which won the 2012 Gold Line Press Poetry Chapbook Competition. Her work has appeared in Best New Poets, North American Review, and Poet Lore, among other places, and she has been the recipient of a Wilbur Gaffney Poetry Prize and a Vreeland Award for Poetry.
Along with Marco Abel and Timothy Schaffert, Poli co-edited the anthology More in Time: A Tribute to Ted Kooser (University of Nebraska Press, 2021), which won a 2022 Nebraska Book Award. She was the Founder and Editor of Birdfeast, an online poetry journal that ran from 2011-2021, and has also served as Editor-in-Chief of Salt Hill Journal. She currently works as Associate Editor for Prairie Schooner.
Originally from Pennsylvania, Poli has lived in Central New York and Nebraska, where she worked seasonally on farms for ten years. She received an MFA from Syracuse University, an MA from the University of Nebraska-Lincoln, and is currently a PhD candidate at the University of Nebraska-Lincoln.