Janet Sylvester

Janet Sylvester (MFA, PhD) has published two books of poems, That Mulberry Wine (Wesleyan University Press) and The Mark of Flesh (W. W. Norton). Her third book, And Not to Break, won the Lauria/Frasca Poetry Prize in October 2019 and will be published by Bordighera Press (NYC) in 2020. She has just begun work on a new collection, tentatively called Color Wheel.

Winner of the Grolier Poetry Prize, a PEN Discovery Award, and a Pushcart Prize, her work has appeared in numerous journals and anthologies, including Best American Poetry; Triquarterly; Virginia Quarterly Review; Georgia Review; Poetry Daily, Harvard Review; and Colorado Review, to name a few. She has also been the recipient of fellowships to Yaddo, the MacDowell Colony, and Virginia Center for the Creative Arts.

Janet’s extensive experience in academia includes positions as the Banister Writer-in-Residence (Sweet Briar College); the Thornton Writer-in-Residence (Lynchburg College), and graduate and/or undergraduate jobs teaching creative writing and literature at Old Dominion University, University of South Carolina, Lesley University and University of Tampa. From 2011-2018, she directed Goddard College’s (VT) low-residency Bachelor of Fine Arts in Creative Writing Program. She now teaches writing classes at Harvard Summer School and Harvard Extension. She can sometimes be found at home, in New Hampshire, with her familiar, a Maine Coon cat, named Simon.