Jennifer Elise Foerster

I believe that poetry happens when human language makes the shape of listening. Listening is not just aural; it is intuition, insight. For me, the ethic of listening is rooted in ecological connection. Listening activates the memory that we are interdependent, tangled within our social and planetary ecologies, that the Earth’s systems are the very systems of breath and body that determine our lives as humans. Poetry can inspire the felt-knowledge of interconnectivity that so many of us have forgotten.

Poetry is an invitation to dilate our comprehensions and our sense of self, to expand our listening and seeing, to encounter the complexity of the question. Poetry, as a language of deep listening, is a state of attention, of listening for the questions and for the original knowledge towards which these questions guide us.

Jennifer Elise Foerster is a poet and educator whose work explores human ecology, contemporary ecopoetics, and the poetics of listening. Her practice investigates listening as an eco-ethical act and as a method of “in-seeing”—the transformation of perception activated in the space between visibility and invisibility. Foerster explores the image and imagination of “ourselves,” asking: Who are we now—in our looking at one another, in our looking for one another—as we look at our past and toward our future? How might we distinguish ourselves now from the “us” of our past, from the “us” of our future, so that we can return to being in relationship with our past, with our future, and ultimately with all life-forms?

Foerster’s poetry enacts listening. In her book, The Maybe-Bird, she created a spiraling structure that seeks “invisible centers”—sonic and vibrational points that exist beyond language—through a sequence of lyric poems spoken by oracles, ghosts, and elements of the natural world. Drawing from myth, memory, and historical documents, the work engages histories of genocide, displacement, and ecological devastation, while resurfacing Mvskoke language and story within the landscapes of the southeastern United States. Her poems emerge from the space between languages, where generative possibilities thrive: a space of emergence, flux, and questioning.

Foerster’s other poetry collections include Bright Raft in the Afterweather (University of Arizona Press, 2018), Leaving Tulsa (University of Arizona Press, 2013), and When the Light of the World Was Subdued, Our Songs Came Through: A Norton Anthology of Native Nations Poetry (W.W. Norton & Company, 2020), co-edited with Joy Harjo and LeeAnne Howe. Her poems have been featured in Personal Best: Makers on Their Poems That Matter Most (Copper Canyon Press, 2023), Living Nations, Living Words: An Anthology of First Peoples Poetry (W.W. Norton, 2021), Native Voices (Tupelo Press, 2019), and New Poets of Native Nations (Graywolf, 2018). Additionally, Foerster collaborated with filmmaker Steven Yazzie on a response to the exhibition Near East to Far West: Fictions of French and American Colonialism at the Denver Art Museum, resulting in the poem "Us," which explores the imaginary "other" in past and future colonial narratives.

She has received numerous fellowships and honors, including the Mesa Refuge Full Circle Indigenous Writers Fellowship (2019), a National Endowment for the Arts Creative Writing Fellowship (2017), the Lannan Foundation Writing Residency Fellowship (2014), and the Wallace Stegner Fellowship in Poetry at Stanford University (2008–2010).

Foerster holds a Ph.D. in English and Literary Arts from the University of Denver (2018), M.F.A from Vermont College of the Fine Arts (2007), and B.F.A. from the Institute of American Indian Arts (2003).