JENNY COOKSON is a poet, critic, teacher, and editor.
Currently a Lecturer in English at the University of Colorado Boulder, Jenny is also founding Editor of MANIFOLD, a new publishing platform for experimental criticism. MANIFOLD published its first issue in 2021, and celebrated the launch with a digital Experimental Criticism Symposium. She is also on the executive committee for the MLA Genre Studies Nonfiction Prose forum and a reader for the Colorado Book Award. From 2012 until August of 2017, Jenny was Managing Editor for the multi-disciplinary English Language Notes, a peer-reviewed academic journal published by the CU Department of English. During her tenure at ELN, Jenny helped to negotiate the successful transfer of production and digital distribution to Duke University Press Journals. Formerly based in New York, Jenny has held commercial editorial positions with Doubleday Publishing Group (Random House/Bertelsmann), Kirkus Media, and SPS Studios, where she primarily edited women’s fiction and commercial non-fiction.
Jenny has a PhD in Literature ("Castle: Ideologies of Exclusion in American Domestic Space") and an MFA in Creative Writing (Poetry), both from CU Boulder, as well as a BA in English from the University of Michigan, Ann Arbor. Jenny's academic research swims in the liminal spaces between feminism, critical race theory, and space theory, in a trans-historical American context. Jenny's critical work is experimental, and her poetry affects critical distance. She lives in Denver with her family, which includes both humans and mini-dachshunds.