Jamaica Baldwin (she/her) is a poet and educator originally from Santa Cruz, CA. Her first book, Bone Language, was published by YesYes Books in June 2023. Her work has appeared in Guernica, World Literature Today, The Adroit Journal, Prairie Schooner, Poetry Northwest, and The Missouri Review, among others. Jamaica is the recipient of a 2023 Pushcart Prize and National Endowment for the Arts Fellowship, and currently teaches in the Department of Writing at Ithaca College in New York.

Books by Jamaica Baldwin:

Other poems on the web by Jamaica Baldwin:
"Back in the Day"
"Father Weaver"
"Forbidden"
"Windfall"
"What's Been Caged"
Two poems
"Home"
"1981"

Jamaica Baldwin's Website.

Jamaica Baldwin on Twitter.

About Bone Language:

"Jamaica Baldwin dedicates a cento for 'Black Women Who Died from Cancer' to Gwendolyn, Audre, Lorraine, Lucille, and June-a breathtaking, heartbreaking list, and so in Bone Language, with lines now writhing and now composed, and ever sensual, she builds a house to heal the body of a Black woman after cancer. Healed by the words of these poets, Jamaica Baldwin stands with them in the hospital of her own language. She pronounces words of resistance to a curious and vengeful world. Bone Language is indeed a beautiful, needful thing."
—Valzhyna Mort

"Bone Language, Baldwin's magic-flecked collection, contains a lament for the inadequacy of dreams in our world. Yet hope is found in her beautiful writing and deeply sophisticated thinking. Her language is spare and her many voices communicate with an arresting strangeness that is at once elegant and disquieting. This is a fine, skilled debut collection by a fully-formed and extremely important poet. "
—Kwame Dawes