Jennifer Whalen (she/her) is a poet, educator, and labor organizer from the Northern Kentucky/Cincinnati, Ohio area. She is the author of the poetry collection Eveningful (2024), which was selected by Rick Barot as the winner of the Lightscatter Press Prize. Her poems can be found in Gulf Coast, Denver Quarterly, Fourteen Hills, Sixth Finch, Grist, The Boiler, and elsewhere. She previously served as writer-in-residence at Texas State University's Clark House and currently teaches English at the University of Illinois Springfield.

Other poems on the web by Jennifer Whalen:
"It's Seven"
"The Heart That Loves Is Always Wrong"
"If I Erase My Body"
"A Light"
Three poems
"The Beginning"

Jennifer Whalen's Website.

About Eveningful:

"Poised between Eliot's love song and Myles's snapshot, Whalen's poems have an aching passion. Like the whip-poor-will and balloons of the morning after, they keep dazzling me back into an alertness towards my own intimate life. Eveningful is about elation and sorrow and the way they can happen almost at the same time, together. The poems are about an avid delight, yes: 'Like sleeping / in someone's favorite sweater, waking up / with its fine threads in my mouth.' And also yes: 'Sometimes the rain / has to start, then stop. Your life will be full / of something; that will have to be enough.' Among the poems in Eveningful are three titled 'It's Seven,' 'It's Nine,' and 'It's Twelve.' Which is to say, the evening is always getting later and deeper, like the heart or like adulthood, arriving at the other side of the night as always: 'I wanted morning to be bright: a few puddles the sun hadn't scorched out,grass greener, vines vinier, the day swollen with plump & me, necessary form among forms: the rivulets of a skirt made more lovely with wind's wavering. But it was just morning. Long dry clear singing morning.'"
—Rick Barot

"Eveningful is lush with earfuls and eyefuls, with arrangements of bodies social and intimate in a world Jennifer Whalen navigates with her understanding that attention is most interesting when one's body is not easily defined. Her assertive, directive, sometimes funny voice rallies as strongly with need as with claim staking. Nothing happens gradually here; splitting what stands from what it stands for makes for a poetic most trusting of immediacy, with a voice that cannot, like things can, drift and waft, but it can, in quick time, wholly 'visualize/the world through bits/of paper:...'. The teensy, the sip, the flash have great power here. Whalen's precise lines make longing palpable with 'dying candles', or 'a single down feather' and bring dance back to 'polka dots'. Here, mutually, 'a breeze is fervor', and a 'blow dryer' have significance. Eveningful has arrived to show us how 'a body can be a fastened/clasp-latch thing'. These poems are wonderfully bright, serious, and sexy like nobody else's."
—Kathleen Peirce

"In Eveningful, Jennifer Whalen sets out the world as an array of possibilities, any one of which might suddenly light up with need of urgent consideration. Love is frequent among them, as well as how love does and does not transform a day (or night's) various arrangements. Reading these poems feels a bit like falling in love, in fact, as if the ground has given way and yet everything it had supported still hovers in place, glimmering with strange particulars that permit us—at last!—to perceive them for the first time."
—Heather Christie