Biography
Jennifer Fossenbell started growing up in Grand Junction, continued in Fort Collins and Boulder, and has yet to finish. Following undergraduate studies in English literature, linguistics, Russian, and secondary education at CU and CSU, she taught English in Denver, Ukraine, and Vietnam. In Hanoi, she established an expat writing collective and fell in with a community of prominent Vietnamese poets through translation projects, festivals, and events. She returned to the US to complete her MFA in creative writing at the University of Minnesota, with a thesis project focused on experimental poetry and translation, hybrid works, and postcolonial studies. She birthed her first child and her graduate thesis in the same month, which she doesn’t recommend. After two more years of teaching composition at the U of M, she moved with her partner and two-year-old to Beijing, China. There, she joined the Spittoon Literary Collective, co-founded a bilingual youth literary journal, co-translated Chinese poetry, co-created another child, and worked as a news editor. She now lives in the northern suburbs of Denver with her one husband, two munchkins, three kitties, and five beloved trees. She daylights as a web content manager for an internet provider.
