Jane Huffman is the author of Public Abstract, winner of the 2023 APR/Honickman First Book Prize, selected by Dana Levin, and Dilemma, forthcoming from Vanderbilt University Press in 2027, selected by Major Jackson for the 2026 Vanderbilt Literary Prize. Her work has appeared in The New Yorker, Poetry, and elsewhere. She was a 2019 recipient of the Ruth Lilly and Dorothy Sargent Rosenberg Fellowship from the Poetry Foundation and is a PhD candidate in English and literary arts at the University of Denver. She teaches at the low-residency MFA program at Warren Wilson College, and online.
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Praise for Public Abstract
“In Public Abstract, Jane Huffman demonstrates a steely commitment to an aesthetic vision. Form is feeling in these poems: tonally cool, their repetitions and hard turns express, passionately, uncertainty, anxiety, revelation, skepticism, and curiosity. Huffman's lived experience—with a sick body, a sick brother, disturbances of psyche and society—are the pains from which the book's formal feelings come. Refreshing the operations of ode, haibun, sestina, and fragment, the poems sometimes teeter on the verge of mannerist madness—what bravery to write them! Completely thrilling to read them. In Jane Huffman's poems, I feel the impassioned psychic venturing of Emily Dickinson, the wit of Kay Ryan, the fragmented surreal of Jean Valentine, and the playfulness and bravado of Gertrude Stein. Public Abstract is a striking debut.” —Dana Levin
