Rochelle Hurt is a poet and essayist. She is the author of three poetry collections: The J Girls: A Reality Show (Indiana University Press, 2022), which won the Blue Light Books Prize from Indiana Review; In Which I Play the Runaway (Barrow Street, 2016), which won the Barrow Street Poetry Prize; and The Rusted City: A Novel in Poems (White Pine, 2014). Her work has been included in Poetry magazine and the Best New Poets anthology. She's been awarded prizes and fellowships from Arts & Letters, Poetry International, Vermont Studio Center, and Yaddo. Originally from the Ohio Rust Belt, Hurt now lives in Orlando and teaches in the MFA program at the University of Central Florida.

Other poems by Rochelle Hurt in Verse Daily:
October 13, 2022:   "For E, Who Asks Me How I Loved So Many Before Her" "One was a truck rolling toward me in reverse...."
June 16, 2014:   "In the Century of Mandatory Crying" "it was decreed that the solution..."
August 22, 2012:   "Honey the Sky Ain't Going" "Bad weather come, but best..."

Books by Rochelle Hurt:

Other poems on the web by Rochelle Hurt:
Four poems
Two poems
Two poems
"Wifebeaters"
Two poems
"Prayer for Containment"
Four poems
"Bright star of disaster"
"Silence is Golden—"

Rochelle Hurt's Website.

Rochelle Hurt on Twitter.

About The J Girls: A Reality Show:

"Brilliant, startling, and stirring, Rochelle Hurt's new book blurs poetry, fiction, and playwriting to capture the lives of a fierce group of girls in Ohio in the late 1990's. Presented as VHS tapes unspooling at a church rummage sale, it's impossible to categorize this innovative, edgy, often hilarious collection. Is it a TV script for the show we've all been waiting for? Is it a love letter to girls we kissed when the nuns weren't looking? Is it a diary, a ransom note, an ad for a sticky floral body spray? "Words get worn / this way: at festivals, we tuck our violence in / our bras with cash for cigarettes and pretzels." Hurt's gorgeous lines linger: "The sky bowed / behind you all afternoon, waiting / for permission. Girl, you / are a hall of mirrors falling on me, / you are the end of looking." I wanted to be part of this club, to kiss The J Girls and kiss up. This book lets you in on secrets whispered behind the door of a bathroom stall with a few too many sneakers underneath, and at least one pair of wobbly heels. Press your ear against the door and listen."
—Carol Guess

"What does it mean to become a woman? In The J Girls, Rochelle Hurt has produced a cinematic anthem, a war cry against gender norms, and a sad reminder of how little has changed for girls traversing the rocky journey into adulthood. The strength of this collection is in the collective experiences where the body becomes an object of desire and the origin of resistance. These poems are unapologetic and tender. Part theater, part screenplay, part poetry, The J Girls is a genre-blending collection demanding the reader see these archetypes as real people with real stories and real unspeakable trauma."
—Nandi Comer

"Like the teenagers at its center, Rochelle Hurt's The J Girls: A Reality Show is wild, smart, aching, and fearless. This genre-exploding book exquisitely captures the thrumming ecstasy and terror and guilt and bravado and tenderness and rage of adolescent girlhood. The J Girls understand that no girl is ever only one girl, and they claim themselves, in all of their iterations, again and again. This book is the bite-and-glitter I wish I'd had as a companion during my own high school years; I'm so grateful to have it now."
—Catherine Pierce