J. Allyn Rosser was born in Bethlehem, Pennsylvania, and grew up in Sparta, New Jersey. She was educated at Middlebury College and the University of Pennsylvania, where she earned her Ph.D. in English Literature. She has taught at the Universities of Houston and Michigan, and now lives in Athens, Ohio where she teaches in the creative writing program of Ohio University.

Misery Prefigured, her second volume of poems, won the Crab Orchard Award and was published by Southern Illinois University Press in 2001. Her first book, Bright Moves, was selected by Charles Simic to win the Morse Poetry Prize (Northeastern University Press).

She has received fellowships from the National Endowment for the Arts, the Ohio Arts Council, Yaddo, Breadloaf, and the New Jersey State Council on the Arts, as well as the Peter I.B. Lavan Award for Younger Poets from the Academy of American Poets, the Frederick Bock Prize from Poetry, and a Pushcart Prize. Her poems have appeared recently in The Atlantic Monthly, Poetry, Slate.com, The Kenyon Review, The Georgia Review, Hunger Mountain, and in several anthologies.

J. Allyn Rosser’s new collection, Foiled Again, won 2007’s New Criterion Poetry Prize and appeared in fall 2007 from Ivan R. Dee.

Sole Blessing (RealAudio)

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Reading at the Y (RealAudio)

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Lover Release Agreement (RealAudio)

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Late Elvis (RealAudio)

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