Contributor Spotlight on Jennifer Perrine
by Dan Froid
This week, we’re shining the spotlight on contributor Jennifer Perrine, who has been very active lately on the Prairie Schooner scene. She recently won the 2014 Prairie Schooner Book Prize for Poetry for her manuscript No Confession, No Mass. She has appeared in two episodes of Air Schooner. In episode 24, she featured as part of Air Schooner’s reading series, in which leading poets and writers read from their work. Perrine read several of her poems, including “In the Human Zoo” and “When Life Gives You Lemons Make.” Listen to episode 24 here. Previously, Perrine appeared in episode 14. In that episode, “Strange Love,” hosts Scott Winter and Stacy Waite discuss the perils of love and how writers respond to it, beginning with a reading from Laura Kipnis’s Against Love: A Polemic. The episode features conversations with Perrine and writer Sarah Wexler. Perrine reads “Portrait of My Lover as a Zombie” and discusses her relationship with the long tradition of the love poem.
Most recently, on September 13, Perrine appeared at the annual Omaha Lit Fest, which is organized by UNL’s own Timothy Schaffert. Perrine, with Leslie Adrienne Miller, Sara Henning, and Laura Madeline Wiseman, read from their contributions to the collection Women Write Resistance: Poets Resist Gender Violence.
Jennifer Perrine is the author of In the Human Zoo (University of Utah Press, 2011) and The Body Is No Machine (New Issues, 2007). In addition, as the winner of the 2014 Prairie Schooner Book Prize for poetry, she will be on Prairie Schooner’s radar again next year: her third collection, No Confession, No Mass, will be published in 2015 by the University of Nebraska Press.
To learn more about Jennifer Perrine, visit her website. To find out more about the Air Schooner podcast series, or to listen to any of its episodes, visit https://prairieschooner.unl.edu/?q=air-schooner.