Jennifer Sperry Steinorth
Summer 2023 | Graphic Text
These pages are excerpted from Her Read, A Graphic Poem published by Texas Review Press, in July of 2021. The book is a facsimile of an artifact: the radical remodel of The Meaning of Art (Faber & Faber, 1931) by British cultural critic Herbert Read. In Read's survey of art from prehistory through the modern era, he includes zero womxn artists, and so from the voice of the male critic surveying male bodies of work, I excavate a first-person female lyric, the imagined voices of unsung womxn artists and the unvoiced womxn framed in gilt.
Jennifer Sperry Steinorth’s books include A Wake with Nine Shades (2019) and Her Read, A Graphic Poem (2021), recipient of Foreword Review’s bronze prize in poetry. She is the recipient of a Beinecke Fellowship and grants from Vermont Studio Center, the Sewanee Writers Conference, Community of Writers, and the University of Michigan. Recent work appears in Cincinnati Review, Denver Quarterly Review, Kenyon Review, Michigan Quarterly, Missouri Review, Plume, and TriQuarterly. An interdisciplinary artist and licensed builder, she lectures at the University of Michigan in the Department of English and the Penny Stamps School of Art & Design, and is at work on a biography of C.D. Wright.
Jen has been recently and delightfully engrossed by Invisible Kingdoms: Reimagining Chronic Illness by poet/essayist/journalist, Megan O'Rourke; Inciting Joy by Ross Gay; Red Comet: The Short LIfe and Blazing Art of Sylvia Plath by Heather Clark; and Seek You: A Journey through American Loneliness by Kristen Radtke, and highly recommends them to her friends who want to learn about invisible illnesses, joy, female artists, loneliness, graphic nonfiction or just want to be steeped in gorgeous reads.