Jennifer Conlon, Tennison S. Black

media release: A Room of One's Own is thrilled to welcome Jennifer Conlon and Tennison S. Black for a reading and conversation from each of their poetry collections Taking to Water and Survival Strategies. Join us to celebrate these excellent authors and their poetry collections!

This is a virtual event on Crowdcast.

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About the books

A tender imagining and devastating reckoning, Jennifer Conlon’s debut Taking to Water presents a poetry collection of gender questioning, concerned with the survival of trans and nonbinary kids who live in places that do not allow them to thrive. Taking to Water is Winner of the 2022 Autumn House Poetry Prize, selected by Carl Phillips. 

A three-part poetry collection that weaves a story about identity, family, and place, Survival Strategies is a love story wrapped in a reckoning. Arranged in three parts, this collection of poems follows a narrative arc. The speaker, who is returning to the Sonoran of her birth after many years away, takes us with her on a journey of enlightenment. 

Jennifer Conlon is from North Carolina and earned their MFA in poetry from Arizona State University. They were awarded the 2015 Aleida Rodriguez Memorial Award in Creative Writing and the 2017 Katharine C. Turner Prize from the Academy of American Poets. More recently, Jennifer won the 2021 Boulevard Poetry Contest for Emerging Poets. Their poems have been published by Bayou Magazine, Juked, Bennington Review, DIALOGIST, Threadcount, and elsewhere. Jennifer lives in Tempe, Arizona, where they teach at Arizona State University. Taking to Water is their first book.

 Tennison S. Black is the author of Survival Strategies (winner of the National Poetry Series, UGA Press 2023). Their work has appeared or is forthcoming in SWWIM, Hotel Amerika, Booth, Wordgathering, and New Mobility, among others. Black received their MFA at Arizona State University. They are the Managing Editor at Sundress Publications and Best of the Net. More about Black and their work can be found at tennionblack.com.