Jennifer Bartell Boykin is the Poet Laureate of the City of Columbia, South Carolina. She was born and raised in Bluefield, a community of Johnsonville, SC. She received the Master of Fine Arts in Creative Writing with a Poetry Concentration (2014) and the Master of Library and Information Science (2024) from the University of South Carolina.
She is the author of her debut book of poetry Traveling Mercy (Finishing Line Press, 2023) and her second book of poetry Only Believe (The Word Works, 2024) is a 2023 winner of The Hilary Tham Capital Collection. Both are published under the name Jennifer Bartell. Her poetry has been published in Obsidian, Callaloo, pluck!, The Raleigh Review, kinfolks, Jasper Magazine, the museum americana, Scalawag, and Kakalak, among others.
She is a 2023 Academy of American Poets Poet Laureate Fellow and founded and organized the Inaugural Soda City Poetry Festival in June 2024. An alumna of Agnes Scott College, Jennifer has additional fellowships from Callaloo and The Watering Hole. She is an award-winning English educator who taught English for 16 years and was the 2019-2020 Teacher of the year at Spring Valley High School. She is currently a school librarian at Spring Valley High School in Columbia, SC.
Videos
Selected Poetry
3 Poems in Jasper Writes
“And Gawd” The Texas Review (TW: Sexual Abuse)
“The Deed Index Before 1963” Scalawag Magazine
“Shakespeare in the Barn” Kinfolks: A Journal of Black Expression
“Louis Armstrong Plays for His Wife in Giza, 1961” museum americana
“Scaling” decomP
“She Who Peopled We” As Us
“Leaves Like Prayer” The Raleigh Review
Articles & Nonfiction
EdSurge Article: “Why Self-Directed Learning is Important for Struggling Students“
The Sweet Water of Craft , presentation at Furious Flower Poetry Conference, 2014
Podcasts, Interviews, Reviews
The Brown Sugar Cafe Podcast, S3E24 Traveling Mercy (with Jennifer Bartell Boykin), April 30, 2024
Year of Nos Interview with Jennifer Bartell Boykin, November 8, 2023
The Binder Podcast: Helping Hands, Columbia Museum of Art, September 19, 2023
Jennifer Bartell Boykin 