Jennifer Grotzyo
Poetry

Grotz grew up in small Texas towns but has lived in France and Poland, all of which inform her poems. Grotz holds degrees from Tulane University (BA), Indiana University (MA and MFA), and the University of Houston (PhD). She also studied Literature at the University of Paris (La Sorbonne), where she discovered her interest in translating French Poetry. Her poems, translations, and reviews have appeared in many literary journals and magazines, and her work has been included in Best American Poetry.

Grotz’s most recent book of poems, The Needle, explores both Polish and American twentieth-century poetry and its traditions. According to a Washington Post review (4/20/11), "Where many writers look inward and mine their private landscapes, Grotz sees the objects and scenes around her. . . . Attentiveness brings her poems—and the world—alive. . . . Grotz's perspective makes her work feel objective and insightful, even when she writes about family tragedies. Her ability to balance artistry and emotion results in buoyant poetry."

Her previous collection, Cusp, is informed by the phrase entre chien et loup, between dog and wolf, which is a French colloquialism for twilight. It signifies a brief instant in the blue light of dusk when the dog, who roams during the day, is about to retreat and when the wolf, who roams at night, just begins to come out. Cusp is a book about being in a kind of middleness, and it is also a book that aims to locate itself in terms of a literary tradition. The longest poem in the book, “Arrival in Rome,” for instance, is an imitation of Keats’s “Ode to a Nightingale” and grapples with the anxiety of influence of a young woman poet. While the poems in Cusp portray the world as divided, the poetic project of the book is to locate a cusp, a "now" moment between past and future, between domestic and foreign, between the random and the inevitable.

Jennifer Grotz teaches creative writing and literature at the University of Rochester, in Rochester, NY. She is currently completing a manuscript of translations of contemporary Psalms from the French poet Patrice de La Tour du Pin.