TJ Jarrett was born in Nashville, Tennessee to a pastor and a professor. She attended Wellesley College and Bennington Writing Seminars. She has published poems in Boston Review, Callaloo, Ninth Letter, Rattle and other publications. After years of wandering, she finds herself back where she started, in Nashville, where she works as a software developer.

Books by TJ Jarrett:

Other poems on the web by TJ Jarrett:
"How to Speak to the Dead"
"Meridian, MS 1964: At The Solstice, The World is Flooded With Light"
Two poems
Two poems
"1920: In Duluth, Minnesota"
"Astronauts"
"Meridian, MS 1958: My Grandmother Meditates on the Miracles of the Christ"

TJ Jarrett on Twitter.

About Ain't No Grave:

"Here is a voice of complete authority: I think of Willa Cather in all her fullness of range and depth, her grief, sureness of step, and ease with life's own half-familiar withholdings. TJ Jarrett pierces the listener with her new—seemingly accustomed, but new unsettlings; I was more lonely before I heard this voice."
—Jean Valentine

"These poems go incredibly deep. They stun us with the richness and pain of love and Darkness. Ain’t No Grave confronts America’s horrific legacy of racism in a voice that addresses the eternal, a fierce voice, yet not without tenderness. Some of the most moving poems I’ve read about family also live between these covers. The poems’ seriousness does not diminish their wit, or their sensuality. A holy inner strength and tireless questioning guide these poems, and a(n)… insistent beauty that makes them kin to prayer."
—Amy Gerstler

"From somewhere between Phillis Wheatley's sly use of iambs and Jupiter Hammon's collisions with the supernatural, comes TJ Jarrett's commitment to narrative lyrics that question the dead and death itself. But these poems are much more staunchly Southern in their drawl and drawing out, or as Jarrett herself might say, they make for a "steady/reach into the body, emerging with its fruit/tight and tender as peaches..." This is a stunning debut from a poet who has already begun to re-read and rewrite the Bible itself."
—Jericho Brown