MFA Alumna Jalynn Harris Featured in The Best American Poetry 2022
March 1, 2023
Contact: Office of Advancement and External Relations
Phone: 410.837.5739
Jalynn Harris, MFA '20, is featured in The Best American Poetry 2022, an annual poetry anthology published by Simon & Schuster.
The Best American Poetry series was launched in 1988 by poet and editor David Lehman, and has been "one of the mainstays of the poetry publication world," according to the Academy of American Poets. Each volume has a different guest editor and "presents a selection of the year's most brilliant, striking, and innovative poems, with comments from the poets themselves lending insight into their work."
Harris's poem, "The Life of a Writer," is one of 75 poems selected for the 2022 edition of the series.
Harris is a Baltimore poet, educator and editor whose work has been published in Transition, Gordon Square Review, Super Stoked Words, Scalawag Magazine and Poets.org. In 2019, she won the Enoch Pratt Free Library/Little Patuxent Review Poetry Contest for her poem, "Phillis Wheatley questions the quarter."
Born and raised in Baltimore, Harris left the city after high school to study linguistics and geography at The University of North Carolina-Chapel Hill. After completing her undergraduate studies, Harris said she felt burned out and was not really considering graduate school. But her mother, who worked at The University of Baltimore as a law librarian for 30 years, kept encouraging her to apply to the MFA program because she knew creative writing was her true passion.
Finally, Harris decided to follow her mom's suggestion and applied to the MFA in Creative Writing & Publishing Arts program: "Best advice I ever took!"
As an incoming student in the MFA program, Harris was one of two inaugural recipients of the Michael F. Klein Fellowship in Creative Writing and Social Justice. The fellowship required Harris to teach English composition to undergraduate students, and the experience was transformative.
"At the end of that very first class, I had fallen in love," Harris said. "I was hooked on teaching."
Since graduating, Harris has taught at all grade levels and currently teaches creative writing at her high school alma mater, the Carver Center for Arts and Technology. She is also pursuing her Maryland State Department of Education certification.
"I want to spend my career teaching in Maryland schools," she says.
Harris was also a two-time recipient of UBalt's Turner Student Research Award, which funds student research related to academic work. Both times, she used the funds to travel to South Africa, the first time soliciting contributors to her first book project, Canary Review, and the second time conducting research for her graduate thesis project, a chapbook called Exit thru the Afro. The thesis project—a book that is written, edited, designed and published by the student—is completed in the final semester of the MFA program.
"I still design and edit books—all skills I learned in the MFA program—under my independent press," Harris said, who founded SoftSavage Press in 2019 as a way to promote literary and visual work by Black writers and artists.
Through the press, Harris sends out a biweekly newsletter with a new poem in each issue, and offers a variety of services to aspiring writers.
"I love helping folks polish their own manuscripts and submissions," she says.
Harris says her next step is to finish and publish her first full-length poetry book.
"I had no idea I could even be considered for such a publication," she says about being included in The Best American Poetry 2022. "It's opened my eyes to all of the possibilities and opportunities available to me."
Learn more about Jalynn Harris.
Read more about The Best American Poetry 2022.
Learn more about UBalt's MFA in Creative Writing & Publishing Arts program.