Jennifer Steele
Poetry
Chicago, IL
Jennifer Steele is a native of Middletown, CT and has lived and worked in Chicago for over 10 years and is the author of the chapbook A House In Its Hunger (Central Square Press, 2018). She is a 2015 Callaloo Fellow and 2016 Poetry Incubator Fellow, and the inaugural recipient of the 2019 Lucille Clifton Creative Parent Award from Raising Mothers Magazine. Her work has appeared in Hypertext Review, Callaloo, Another Chicago Magazine, Columbia Poetry Review, Pittsburgh Poetry Review, and notable others. She received her MFA in Poetry from Columbia College Chicago in 20018 and her BM in Music Business from Howard University in 2006.
She is the Founder of Revolving Door Arts, a nonprofit organization and press dedicated to empowering creative community and evolving the artistic craft of young, new and emerging writers.
In addition to being a writer, she is a passionate educator. For over 10 years, she has worked with nonprofit education organizations and institutions across Chicago designing and implementing creative writing, arts and digital media curriculum, programs, and project-based learning initiatives. Currently, she is the Partnerships Coordinator for Teen Services at Chicago Public Library where she has been involved in its YOUmedia program since its inception in 2009 as part of her work with Digital Youth Network (DYN). With both DYN and Chicago Public Library she has served as a teaching artist and mentor, education research associate, and lead and co-lead the design and implementation of major programmatic initiatives including creative workforce development program, (PRO)jectUS, teen-lead and designed literary festival ChiTeen Lit Fest, and the online creative writing learning pathway Young Author Playlist.
Her work and experience in education and the literary community have provided her the opportunity to serve as a grant review panelist for the National Endowment for the Arts in Arts Education and Literature in 2015 and 2016 respectively, as well as, a 2019 Mozilla Festival (Mozfest) wrangler.
Through her creative and education work she has had the privilege of teaching for and working with partners including Studs Terkel Radio Archive, 826CHI, Young Chicago Authors, Museum of Contemporary Art, Center for College Access and Success at Northeastern University, Art of Culture, Inc., Commonwealth Foundation, Camp of Dreams, Polyphony HS, and others. She is a member of the Chicago Learning Exchange (formerly Hive Chicago) and YOUmedia Network, and has presented her work at national and international conferences.
She is working on a full-length collection of poetry entitled Belt, and is a very proud mama.
The process of writing her chapbook brought out stories and memories of women around her who began to share their own experiences as Black women and mothers. These exchanges of stories which started to become an unsilencing unlocked a deeper urgency to write work that reflects experiences of Black women trying to navigate loving, mothering, and authentically being in the midst of depression, postpartum, parenting, partnering, cultural expectations and traditions, and society. Her time at Ragdale will help yield a collection of poetry of self-permission and reclamation, how we can move away from constraints and toward freedoms found in the journey of living and loving both within and beyond our diverse, individual identities.
Featured Work
Trust Fall
Poem by Jennifer Steele
On a summer night along the CT River
where we are stealing time
from the curfew of a park
where no one but the fisherman
joins our nightly company
my tongue keeps calling the mosquito
a king.
Sitting atop the railing
between me and the water,
my fingers loosen without warning
from the swallow of your neck,
investigating your reflexes
and how long the weight of my body
pushing against your forearms
will hold.
You try to teach me about other muscles
and how my tongue can shape itself into song,
lend me your language under stars
but I fail the notes over and over.
I don’t want to sing or trumpet my guilt
for not knowing the origin of my skin
or what languages are christened
in the caverns of my taste buds.
I won’t butcher the beauty,
expose the truth I carry
in my unrooted mouth.
All I know is that I am a girl
who enjoys falling backwards
without warning
into the middle of the night
and the thrill in the risk
of not being caught in time.
I tell you I can’t sing.
But you smile and say
I am getting there.
I’ve got you. Mmema fi
no matter how many times
the king is a mosquito.