Janet Sylvester

Winner of the Lauria/Frasca Poetry Prize at Bordighera Press (promoting the poetry of the Italian diaspora in English), a Pushcart Prize, a PEN Discovery Award, the Grolier Poetry Prize, a DeWitt-Wallace Reader’s Digest Fellowship to the MacDowell Colony and fellowships to Yaddo and VCCA, Janet Sylvester’s poems have appeared in many journals and anthologies, including, among others, Divining Dante; Best American Poetry; Virginia Quarterly Review; Georgia Review; Poetry Daily; Boulevard; Harvard Review; and Colorado Review. In fall 2024, she will be the Ofstad Writer-in-Residence at Truman State University in Missouri.

Spencer Reece says of her third book, And Not to Break (2020): these “…poems shine with courage and resilience, containing what I am most looking for these days: hope. Hope is not an easy virtue to catch in paint or with words, yet here it is, captivating and multilayered as in a Durer or a Da Vinci.” Mark Jarman, in Hudson Review (2021), comments: in “Janet Sylvester’s excellent new book… in poem after poem, imagery, that god in the details, comes to the aid of a poet who shares her sorrows as richly as her joys.” Highlighting a poem called “Baby,” Jarman says, “anyone who cares about poetry will know who Baby is or, let me say, will recognize that she is poetry itself.” Her early books include That Mulberry Wine (Wesleyan University Press) and The Mark of Flesh (Norton).

She is currently working on a new book, tentatively called Feather and Wedge, as she teaches expository and creative writing courses at Harvard Summer School, Harvard Extension and Endicott College, on Boston’s North Shore. She lives in Rockport MA with Thelma, a physically diminutive, but mightily willful cat.