Jessica Stark

Jessica Q. Stark is the author of Buffalo Girl (BOA Editions, 2023), winner of a Florida Book Award and a finalist for the 2023 Maya Angelou Book Award, Savage Pageant (Birds, LLC, 2020), and five poetry chapbooks, including most recently The Flea, which won first place for the MAYDAY microchapbook prize in 2025. Her poems have appeared in The Nation, Gulf Coast, Best American Poetry, Pleiades, and The Florida Review, among other publications. 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.

Artist Statement

My poetry confronts the violence of selective memory, on both personal and national levels. In my latest poetry collection, Buffalo Girl, I juxtapose the moral implications of the Little Red Riding Hood stories with my mother's immigration story from Vietnam during the fallout of war, which creates an image-text conversation that attends to the “wolves” lurking in the forests of our everyday lives. Currently, I am working on a new manuscript that examines the mythos around Marie Antoinette and the implications of the pervasive presence of Internet technology and its influence on how we view femininity, empire, collective (in)action, and selfhood. Throughout my creative and pedagogical work, I am repeatedly drawn to questions of historical accountability and the revolutionary power of poetry to convey personal and national stories that have been distorted, rewritten, or erased. For me, poetry serves as a medium through which I imagine a way out of a stifling cycle of global violence—one that constantly challenges the notion that language, and the human habits it reflects, are ever truly fixed or locked in time.