Laura Linnea Jensen is an American poet

Poet

A poet is a person who writes poetry. A poet's work can be literal, meaning that his work is derived from a specific event, or metaphorical, meaning that his work can take on many meanings and forms. Poets have existed since antiquity, in nearly all languages, and have produced works that vary...

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She graduated from the University of Washington in Seattle, where she studied with David Wagoner

David Wagoner

David Russell Wagoner is an American poet who has written many poetry collections and ten novels. Two of his books have been nominated for National Book Awards....

, Mark Strand

Mark Strand

Mark Strand is an American poet, essayist, and translator. He was appointed Poet Laureate Consultant in Poetry to the Library of Congress in 1990. Since 2005, he has been a professor of English at Columbia University.- Biography :...

, and Galway Kinnell

Galway Kinnell

Galway Kinnell is an American poet. He was Poet Laureate of Vermont from 1989 to 1993. An admitted follower of Walt Whitman, Kinnell rejects the idea of seeking fulfillment by escaping into the imaginary world. His best-loved and most anthologized poems are "St...

, and from the Iowa Writers’ Workshop with an MFA in 1974, where she studied with Norman Dubie

Norman Dubie

Norman Dubie is an American poet.-Life:He is the author of more than eighteen books, often assuming historical personae in his works...

, Donald Justice

Donald Justice

Donald Justice was an American poet and teacher of writing. In summing up Justice's career, David Orr has written, "In most ways, Justice was no different from any number of solid, quiet older writers devoted to traditional short poems. But he was different in one important sense: sometimes his...

, and Marvin Bell

Marvin Bell

Marvin Bell is an American poet and teacher who was the first Poet Laureate of the State of Iowa.Bell was born in New York City and raised in Center Moriches, Long Island...

. She became friends with Tess Gallagher

Tess Gallagher

Tess Gallagher is an American poet, essayist, author and playwright. She attended the University of Washington, where she studied creative writing with Theodore Roethke and later Nelson Bentley as well as David Wagoner and Mark Strand...

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Her work appeared in Ploughshares.
She read at Burning Word 2005.
She lives near Wright Park

Wright Park Arboretum

- See also :* List of botanical gardens in the United States* List of Registered Historic Places in Pierce County, Washington...

, Tacoma, Washington

Tacoma, Washington

Tacoma is a mid-sized urban port city and the county seat of Pierce County, Washington, United States. The city is on Washington's Puget Sound, southwest of Seattle, northeast of the state capital, Olympia, and northwest of Mount Rainier National Park. The population was 198,397, according to...

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Awards

• 1989 Guggenheim Fellowship
  Guggenheim Fellowship
  Guggenheim Fellowships are American grants that have been awarded annually since 1925 by the John Simon Guggenheim Memorial Foundation to those "who have demonstrated exceptional capacity for productive scholarship or exceptional creative ability in the arts." Each year, the foundation makes...
  
  
• NEA
  National Endowment for the Arts
  The National Endowment for the Arts is an independent agency of the United States federal government that offers support and funding for projects exhibiting artistic excellence. It was created by an act of the U.S. Congress in 1965 as an independent agency of the federal government. Its current...
  
  fellowship
• Washington State Arts Commission grant

Works

• "Sarge"; "Steve Allen", Salt River Review, Volume 6, Number 1, Winter, 2002–2003
• "The Red Dog", Nothing to Say and Saying It, September 6, 2006

• Shelter Dragon Gate, 1985 ISBN 9780937872284
• Memory, Dragon Gate, 1982, ISBN 9780937872024; Carnegie Mellon University Press, 2006, ISBN 9780887484568
• Bad boats, Ecco Press, 1977; ECCO Press, 1984 ISBN 9780912946399

Chapbooks

• Sky Empty of Orion, 1985
• The Story Makes Them Whole, Porch Publications, 1979
• Tapwater: poems, Graywolf Press, 1978
• Anxiety and ashes: poems, Penumbra Press, 1976
• After I Have Voted, Gemini 1972

External links

• Author's blog
• Joe Anistranski: “Laura Jensen’s Bad Boats”, Contemporary Poetry: a web symposium Spring 2006
• "Bad Boats by LAURA JENSEN, Recovered by JASON STUMPF", Octopus Magazine, Issue 7
• "A Shelter, A Kingdom, A Half Promised Land: Three Poets In Mid-Career", Virginia Quarterly Review, Summer 1987, pp. 426–436