Jennifer Militello

Jennifer Militello was born in New York City and grew up in Rhode Island. She earned her BA at the University of New Hampshire, where she studied with Charles Simic, her MFA at the University of North Carolina at Greensboro, and her PhD from Bath Spa University in the United Kingdom. 

Militello is the author of Identifying the Pathogen (Tupelo Press, 2026); The Pact (Tupelo Press/Shearsman Books, 2021); Knock Wood (Dzanc Books, 2019), winner of the Dzanc Nonfiction Prize; A Camouflage of Specimens and Garments (Tupelo Press, 2016); Body Thesaurus (Tupelo Press, 2013); and Flinch of Song (Tupelo Press, 2009), winner of the Tupelo Press First Book Award.

In her review of Body Thesaurus, Cate Marvin writes, “In the face of supreme, and therefore extreme, quietude (‘The mouth of me is bitten off’), Jennifer Militello’s poems hand us over to that other life we nightly receive in dream, a dimension at once seamless and yet so strange.” Publishers Weekly has described Militello’s work as “largely an exquisite example of the modern gothic: shadowy, beset by menacing weather and violent feelings, and positively bewitching.” 

Militello is the recipient of grants and fellowships from the Barbara Deming Memorial Fund, Millay Arts, New Hampshire State Council on the Arts, and Writers at Work, as well as awards from Bellingham Review and Red Hen Press, among other honors.

Militello teaches in the MFA program at New England College and lives in Goffstown, New Hampshire. In 2024, she was appointed the poet laureate of New Hampshire.