Jenny Browne’s recent poems—from her forthcoming book I Am Trying to Love the Whole World (BOA 2026)—grapple after grace through incantations, linguistic veers, refutations of easy solace, and “trying to praise what left us gutted.” Browne’s work is fierce and tender all at once, and her poems brim with both loss and beauty as they bear down brilliantly on grief and the forever-failable human heart.
Jenny Browne is the author of three previous collections of poems—At Once, The Second Reason and Dear Stranger, all from the University of Texas Press— as well as two chapbooks. A former James Michener Fellow at the University of Texas, she has received the Cecil Hemley Memorial Award from the Poetry Society of America, a National Endowment for the Arts Fellowship in Poetry and two creative writing fellowships from the Texas Writers League. She was the 2018 Poet Laureate of the State of Texas and the 2020 Distinguished Fulbright Scholar in Creative Writing at Queens University in Northern Ireland.
Browne’s reading will be followed by conversation with Dawn Watson in Weinstein Auditorium in Wright Hall on Tuesday, February 24 at 7 p.m. Free & open to the public. Books will be sold and a signing will follow. Livestream also available on the BDPC YouTube page.
