Photo cred: Brian Kim

You can order Buffalo Girl over at BOA Editions here

Jessica Q. Stark is a California-native, Vietnamese American poet, editor, and educator that lives in Jacksonville, Florida. She holds a BA from UC Berkeley and dual MA Degrees in English Literature and Cultural Studies from Saint Louis University’s Madrid Campus. She received her PhD in English from Duke University. She has published scholarly articles on poetry, visual media, and material culture. She is an Assistant Professor in Creative Writing (Poetry) in the English Department at the University of North Florida.

Her poetry has most recently appeared or is forthcoming in Best American Poetry, Poetry Society of America, Pleiades, Up the Staircase Quarterly, Carolina Quarterly, Poetry Daily, wildness, The Boiler, The Southeast Review, Verse Daily, Tupelo Quarterly, Potluck, and for the Glass Poetry Journal: Poets Resist series. Her first poetry chapbook manuscript, The Liminal Parade, was selected by Dorothea Lasky for the Double Take Grand Prize in 2016 and was published by Heavy Feather Review. She is the author of four poetry chapbooks, including her most recent RENDER (Eat Poems Series, 2022) and INNANET (The Offending Adam, 2021), which is an excerpt of an ongoing poetry zine series she writes.

Her first full-length poetry collection, Savage Pageant, which was a finalist for Poetry Society of America’s Norma Farber Prize, the Cleveland State University Poetry Center Book Prize, the 42 Miles Press Book Prize, and the Rose Metal Press Hybrid Book Prize, was published by Birds, LLC in March 2020. Savage Pageant was named one of the “Best Books of 2020” in The Boston Globe and in Hyperallergic. Her second full-length poetry manuscript, Buffalo Girl, finalist for the Noemi Book Prize and the Cleveland State University Center Book Prize, was published in Spring 2023 by BOA Editions. She occasionally writes poetry reviews for Carolina Quarterly and formerly served as the Comics Editor and the Hybrid Editor for Honey Literary. She is currently a Poetry Editor for AGNI.

She has lived in several cities across the globe, including Seoul, South Korea, Madrid, Spain, and for a short time in Zihuatanejo, Mexico, where she ran a backpackers’ hostel with her partner and learned how to crack a coconut with a machete. In her free time, she is a cat-lover, an arts organizer, and has been trained as a Level Two Reiki practitioner. 

SHORT BIO:

Jessica Q. Stark is the author of Buffalo Girl (BOA Editions, 2023), Savage Pageant (Birds, LLC, 2020) and four poetry chapbooks, including INNANET (The Offending Adam, 2021). She is a Poetry Editor at AGNI and is an Assistant Professor of Creative Writing at the University of North Florida. She co-organizes the Dreamboat Reading Series in Jacksonville, Florida.