The editors are so pleased to featured Gray Jacobik as the featured visual artist for this Portfolio Issue. Gray lived in the Washington D.C. area for more than twenty years and was an early member of the Capitol Hill Poetry Group, and affliated with Washington Writers’ Publishing House, and once taught at the Writers’ Center. She feels that she cut her teeth as a baby poet in D.C. and still counts among her friends, many fine poets she first came to know in our Capital.
For more information about her work as a poet, please visit: https://www.grayjacobik.com/
For more information about her visual art, see: https://grayjacobikartist.com/
Gray Jacobik earned her Ph.D. in American and British Literature from Brandeis University under the tutelage of Allen Grossman. She holds the rank of University Professor Emerita at Eastern Connecticut State University. A widely published and anthologized poet, and a recipient of a National Endowment for the Arts Fellowship in Creative Writing and an Artist’s Fellowship from the Connecticut Commission on the Arts, she is the winner of The Yeats Prize given by The Yeats Society of New York, and of The Emily Dickinson Award sponsored by Universities West Press. Her book, The Double Task (University of Massachusetts Press, 1998) received the Juniper Prize (selected by James Tate) and was nominated for the James Laughlin Award and the Poet’s Prize. The Surface of Last Scattering (Texas Review Press, 1999) was chosen by X. J. Kennedy as the winner of the X. J. Kennedy Poetry Prize. Brave Disguises received the AWP Poetry Series Award for 2001 and is published by the University of Pittsburgh Press. Jacobik served as the Robert Frost Poet-in-Residence at the Frost Place during the summer of 2002. For nearly a decade she mentored graduate students through the Stonecoast MFA Program (University of Southern Maine). Jacobik is the author of Little Boy Blue: A Memoir in Verse (CavanKerry Press, 2011) and received the 2016 William Meredith Award in Poetry for The Banquet: New & Selected Poems (Poets’ Choice, 2016), which was nominated for both a National Book Award and a Pulitzer. Her book, Eleanor, dramatic monologues in the voice of Eleanor Roosevelt, is forthcoming from CavanKerry Press. In 2017 she received a Lifetime Achievement Award for contributions to the literature of Connecticut from The Connecticut Center for the Book and The Connecticut Humanities Council. She is an award-winning painter as well as a poet. For more than twenty years she’s been painting landscapes, still lifes, and abstract works in pastel, oil, acrylic, encaustic and gouache, and exhibiting her work throughout Connecticut and on-line. To read more by this author: "The Capitol Hill Poetry Group," Literary Organizations Issue, Vol. 11:2, Spring 2010; "Forgetting David Weinstock," Plan B Press Issue, Vol. 11:3, Summer 2010.