Jackie Craven

Jackie Craven writes poetry and prose steeped in magical realism. Recent poems appear in AGNI, Beloit Poetry Journal, The Cincinnati Review, New Ohio Review, Pleiades, Ploughshares, and many other journals and anthologies. She's the author of the collection, Secret Formulas & Techniques of the Masters (Brick Road Poetry Press) and two chapbooks, Cyborg Sister (Headmistress Press) and Our Lives Became Unmanageable (Omnidawn award for fabulist fiction). After completing a Doctor of Arts from the English Department at UAlbany, she worked for many years as a journalist covering architecture, art, and travel. She lives in Schenectady, New York; Cocoa Beach, Florida; and on Zoom, where she hosts a long-standing open mic for writers.

Dreamy, with an imagination dynamized by a magical realist sensibility, Craven’s collection imagines past, present, and future as wily characters that intervene and trouble, shape and undermine our best intentions. You’ll find Nancy Drew in these pages, allusions to Einstein and references to Star Trek, as well as list poems, typographically playful poems, and beguiling titles like, “Long Before Periwinkles Appear, I Hoe My Life into Tidy Rows.” Always in Whish there is a spirit of play and an interest in renovating and re-conceiving worn conceptions of time. —Sarah Giragosian, Heavy Feather Review

About WHISH

Jackie Craven toys with time in WHISH, winner of the 2024 Press 53 Award for Poetry. Surreal prose blocks follow the uneasy relationship between a wistful narrator and shape-shifting characters—managers, bookkeepers, secretaries—who manifest as hours of the day. "It’s rare to find such perfect prose poetry," says series editor, Tom Lombardo. "Jackie Craven’s abrupt swerves and disruptive metaphors drop readers off cliffs, repeatedly." Startling, provocative, and darkly comical, WHISH speeds along a "quantum highway" where memory and loss plume into stained glass light.

About the Cover Artist

Cover artist Sharon Craven Kinzer (1943-2022) became known for her intricate trompe l’oeil paintings. She studied classical techniques at the Schuler School of Fine Arts in Baltimore and exhibited her work at the Smithsonian Institute, Veerhoff Gallery in Washington D.C., and many other museums and galleries. She grew up in Virginia with her sister (the author) and their artist mother, and lived in Ohio and North Carolina with her husband and sons. Paintings can be viewed at SharonCravenKinzer.com