BIOGRAPHY

Jeanann Verlee is a poet, essayist, editor, and former punk rocker who collects tattoos and kisses Rottweilers. She is a National Endowment for the Arts Poetry Fellow and the author of three books: prey, first runner-up for the Benjamin Saltman Poetry Award (Black Lawrence Press), Said the Manic to the Muse (Write Bloody Publishing) and Racing Hummingbirds, silver medal winner in the Independent Publisher Book Awards (Write Bloody Publishing). She has also been awarded the Third Coast Poetry Prize and the Sandy Crimmins National Prize for Poetry.

Her work is featured in numerous journals, including Academy of American Poets, BuzzFeed, Adroit, Thrush, Muzzle, Rattle, and VIDA, and has been been anthologized in various publications, including Uncommon Core: Contemporary Poems for Learning and Living, The Courage Anthology: Daring Poems for Gutsy Girls, and Looking for the Enemy: The Eternal Internal Gender Wars of Our Sisters Anthology. She was first runner-up for the Indiana Review Poetry Prize and has received multiple nominations for the Pushcart Prize, Best of the Net, and Bettering American Poetry.

Verlee is a copy editor working both freelance and in-house for various authors and organizations. She was poetry editor for Union Station Magazine, For Some Time Now: Performance Poets of New York City, and Winter Tangerine Review: Fragments of Persephone, among others. She has copyedited several award-winning books, and serves a roster of clients and companies providing in-depth content review. 

Verlee represented New York City ten times at the National Poetry Slam, Individual World Poetry Slam, and Women of the World Poetry Slam under both Urbana Poetry Slam and The louderARTS Project. Verlee was an NPS Finalist while representing louderARTS and twice earned the title of Urbana iWPS Champion. For eight seasons, she was the director of Urbana Poetry Slam reading series at Bowery Poetry Club where she also served as writing and performance coach. Verlee performs and facilitates workshops remotely and at schools, theatres, libraries, bookstores, and dive bars 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 guerrilla theatre events spotlighting domestic violence under MSU’s Theatre for Social Change, and was a charter member of New York City’s Spoken Word Almanac Project. Verlee has performed for hundreds of programs and universities, including PBS’s Brief But Spectacular, PEN America’s PEN Out Loud, Lincoln Center for the Performing Arts, NYC Poetry Festival, Word X Word, Split This Rock, The Juilliard School, Princeton, Yale, and more.

An enthusiast of letter-writing campaigns and handmade protest signs, Verlee has also devoted many years to social justice and animal rights, and has organized and participated in numerous social actions. She continues her advocacy work through essays, poetry, and speaking engagements, boldly confronting the complexities of mental health, sexual predation, trauma survival, domestic abuse, gender equity, racism, aging, and chronic illness.

She drafted her first poem on the inside cover of a collection of Grimm’s Fairy Tales at the age of seven (no worries, she wrote it in pencil!). 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. 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, she found herself blindsided by the insurmountable distraction of tattooed boys and dying her mohawk pink. A hardcopy of the unfinished manuscript remains in her apartment and she swears she will return to it one day.

Verlee lives in New York City, She believes in you.