Jennifer O'Grady is a poet and playwright. Born to an Italian-American mother and an Irish father, she grew up in New York City and earned a BA from Vassar, where she won awards for her poetry, and an MFA from Columbia University. She is the author of White, winner of the Mid-List Press First Series Award for Poetry and a Greenwall grant from The Academy of American Poets. Her poems have been taught, anthologized, set to music, and featured in Harper's, The New Republic, The Writer's Almanac with Garrison Keillor, Poetry, Poetry Daily, American Poetry: The Next Generation and numerous other places. Her poems have garnered a Billee Murray Denny Award, a W. K. Rose Fellowship, and Pushcart Prize nominations, among other honors. Her plays include Charlotte's Letters (The Irish Repertory Theatre's New Works Series and Semifinalist for the O'Neill Center's National Playwrights Conference and BETC's Generations Award); Paranormal Love (Winner: Manhattan Theatre Works NewBorn Festival; Finalist: NEWvember New Play Festival); Ellery (selected for The Best Women's Stage Monologues 2017); Quasars (selected for The Best Women's Stage Monologues 2014 and Best Contemporary Monologues for Women 18–35); Juggling with Mr. Fields (nominated for The Kilroys List); and Persephone (Semifinalist: Little Fish Theatre's Pick of the Vine). Her short plays First Day in Trade and The Great Gaffe are included in The Best Ten-Minute Plays 2017 and The Best Ten-Minute Plays 2016 (Smith and Kraus). She has worked in publishing, directed literary programs for the YMCA National Writer's Voice and The Academy of American Poets, and is a former producer of the nonprofit Pelham Children's Theater. She lives near New York City with her husband, son, and daughter, two dogs, two cats, and a rabbit.

Books by Jennifer O'Grady:

Other poems on the web by Jennifer O'Grady:
Four poems
Three poems
"Fireflies"
Two poems
"Moths"
Three poems

Jennifer O'Grady on Twitter.

About Exclusions & Limitations:

"... between O'Grady's assured and subtly measured lines lurk dangers and 'damages that may not be covered.' ... [She] views seemingly benign moments ... with a keen maternal prescience that exposes them as fraught with foreboding. Moving edgily from catastrophe to the mysteriousness of love itself, O'Grady shows how to bear the unknowable.."
—Jeanne Marie Beaumont

"... conjures the sort of dream world that follows you after you're awake.... numinous, recounting desire and its cost from some inevitable Purgatory.... carefully wrought sonic texture, the range of styles from prose poem to lyric, narrative to alliterative abecedarian induces an orchestral intensity. This is a book that refuses to go away...."
—John Hoppenthaler

"Always lyrically animated, the clear often-elegiac note struck in these poems signals O'Grady's wakefulness to the shifting light and shade of things. Here is a natural world brought to attention by the unsparing intensity of the poet's gaze. Whether listing the colors of cattle at pasture ('rust, tobacco and / ashen'), or observing goldfish in a pond ('quick bits/ of firelight, orange rind, / shrapnel, tiny meteors with / nowhere to fall'), O'Grady's exact, exacting language is always up to her descriptive, meditative task.... sharp-sighted, probing and pondering the ordinary adventure of life and its extraordinary hunger for what is to be loved, what is to survive...."
—Eamon Grennan

"... there are no limitations to this poet's imagination.... It is in the study of childhood aptitude for detachment. It is in the storm-torn pear tree, the alphabet, the garden in which she admires wildflowers with her mother.... the most admirable poetic dimensionality and ingenuity—breadth and depth, intellectual edge—with grace and levity to boot.... wonderment and horror entangling with wit and curiosity.... a grand poetic performance of a bright mind and marvelous, fine-tuned heart."
&Elizabeth Cohen