Jackie Craven combines a career in journalism with whimsical and often surreal writings for literary publications. Her chapbook, Our Lives Became Unmanageable (Omnidawn, 2016), won the publisher's Fabulist Fiction Award. Her poems have appeared in Columbia Poetry Review, New Ohio Review, Nimrod, River Styx, Salamander, Spillway, Water~Stone Review, Women's Studies Quarterly, and elsewhere. Secret Formulas & Techniques of the Masters (Brick Road Poetry Press, 2018) is her debut poetry collection. In her other lives, Jackie has worked as a travel writer, old-house rehabber, college instructor, architecture columnist, and author of books on interior design. She writes at a cluttered desk beneath her mother's painting of a juggler, a monkey, and a chaise lounge drifting in midair.

Other poems by Jackie Craven in Verse Daily:

Books by Jackie Craven:

Other poems on the web by Jackie Craven:
Eigth poems
Two poems

*Jackie Craven's Website.

*Jackie Craven According to Wikipedia.

*Jackie Craven on Twitter.

About Secret Formulas & Techniques of the Masters:

"In a kind of literary trompe l'oeil, Jackie Craven's marvelous first full-length collection is ultimately about the invisible—and only sometimes benign—subterfuge beneath what appears authentic. Sassy or respectful, elegiac or terse, her poems give us a world paradoxically 'dark and bright, strange, [yet] familiar.' Whether in the guise of investigating various particulars of creating art, or exploring the complicated emotional layers within human relationships, Craven reveals secrets, keeping me turning pages, wanting more of her fine work."
—Andrea Hollander

"This book is a life, a collection of interwoven lives, revealed by imagination. It is a meditation on childhood, age, artistic vision, family and death. The language is crisp, inventive, and the poems brilliantly shaped, full of surprise and a sense of the finality of their form, which often seems like precise dramatic timing. And with this mastery of the art, a sense of lives grasped and held close. It is hard to believe that this is a first book, it is so wonderfully accomplished."
—Barry Goldensohn

"Jackie Craven is a triple threat: her poems are visually acute, sonically gorgeous, and imaginatively transporting. She herself is a Master. Open anywhere, and you won't want to stop. BUY. THIS. BOOK."
—Barbara Ungar,