Jessica Manack holds degrees from Hollins University and lives with her family in Pittsburgh's North Side. Her writing has appeared widely in literary journals and has been nominated for the Pushcart Prize, and she has been the recipient of a Curious Creators Grant and Getaway Artist Fellowship. She is the Development Editor at Belt Magazine and a poetry reader for TriQuarterly. As the winner of the 2023 First Chapbook Prize, her poetry collection GASTROMYTHOLOGY was published by Sheila-Na-Gig Editions in 2024.

Other poems on the web by Jessica Manack:
"The Gleaners"
"Starlight Bloodhound"

Jessica Manack's Website.

About Gastromythology:

"Jessica Manack's delicious debut is poetic archaeology-unearthing the myths of ancestry, motherhood, and all manner of hungers. The poet digs deep and exposes a world where women and girls bear the brunt of family and place ('there was no dinner without someone's broken back') yet her myth-busting in these transformative and melodic poems banish shame and fear, revealing instead 'something that fills you.' Gastromythology is a feast of poetic forms matched with chic grace, intelligence, and surprise."
—Marianne Worthington

"Jessica Manack's poetry collection, Gastromythology, is all about the things we take in, that we put inside of our minds and bodies. It could be tobacco. It could be peaches, prunes, or alfalfa. It could be mathematics and is most certainly love and power and sadness and grace. The intestines of poetics flare in this collection and so the belly is left full. Full of heart and reconstitution, memory, desire, and home. One might call it a cornucopia of just being together under the good roof of sustenance. It is that taste of tart wheat sharp and sweet on the tongue and this collection is totally 'worth it.' But it's not a matter of worth and more, as Manack writes, The house I built didn't have a roof until I shouted your name. Gastromythology is that house and these poems are the roof that covers us in our hunger and desire and then fills it all up with the good stuff."
—Matthew Lippman