Poet Jena Osman earned an MA in poetry and playwriting from Brown University and a PhD in English from the Poetics Program at SUNY Buffalo. She is the author of more than five collections of poetry, including Twelve Parts of Her (1989), Amblyopia (1993), Jury (1996), and The Character (1999), winner of the Barnard New Women Poets Prize. Osman’s recent work includes An Essay in Asterisks (2004) and The Network (2010), which won a National Poetry Series Award.

On the Rumpus, Brian Spears explained the fascinating and unique appeal of Osman’s style in The Network, arguing that “it doesn’t look like poetry, and at times it doesn’t even sound like poetry, but the connections it makes and the way it envelopes me in language convinces me it can’t be anything but poetry.”

Osman’s awards and honors include a 2006 Pew Fellowship in the Arts as well as grants from the National Endowment for the Arts, the New York Foundation for the Arts, the Pennsylvania Council on the Arts, and the Fund for Poetry. Her work has appeared in literary journals and anthologies, including The Best American Poetry of 2002, American Letters & Commentary, Conjunctions, Hambone, and Verse.

With Juliana Spahr, Osman founded the literary magazine Chain, and they edit the ChainLinks Book series together. She has been a writing fellow at the MacDowell Colony, the Blue Mountain Center, the Djerassi Foundation, and Château de La Napoule. Osman currently teaches poetry workshops as well as seminars on contemporary poetry and poetics in the Graduate Creative Writing Program at Temple University.