J.C. Todd

Author of three collections, What Space This Body, Nightshade and Entering Pisces, her poems have appeared in such journals as The Paris Review, Virginia Quarterly Review, and American Poetry Review and on-line at Referential Magazine, Big Bridge and Wild River Review, and at Verse Daily. She has been a finalist in the Lucille Medwick Lyric Poetry Contest of the Poetry Society of America.

A 2014 Pew Fellow in the Arts, she also holds fellowships from the Pennsylvania Council on the Arts, the Virginia Center for the Creative Arts and the Baltic Center for Writers and Translators in Sweden, two Leeway awards for poetry, and a VCCA fellowship to the German artist colony at Schloss Wiepersdorf. She has featured at poetry festivals in the Baltics, Macedonia and Italy and at the Dodge Festival. A lecturer in Creative Writing at Bryn Mawr College and the MFA Program at Rosemont, she holds an MFA from the Program for Writers at Warren Wilson College.

Artistic Statement
I trust in the physical body as a receptor and expresser. I listen for what’s “below language,” inchoate longing that words can’t express and use language to make shapes that longing might percolate through. Like sound sculpture but that seems too big. What I do is small, a phoneme—vowel timbre—image—with attention to the order in which they’re released, the recurrence of silence, the uses of form and figure.