Jillian Weise

Jillian Weise was born in Houston, Texas, in 1981. A poet, performance artist, and disability rights activist, she studied at Florida State University, University of North Carolina at Greensboro, and the University of Cincinnati.

Weise is the author of three collections of poetry, including Cyborg Detective (BOA Editions, 2019) and The Book of Goodbyes (BOA Editions, 2013), winner of the 2013 James Laughlin Award from the Academy of American Poets, which recognizes a superior second book of poetry by an American poet. 

As Laughlin Award judge Brenda Shaughnessy wrote about Weise's winning book:

Jillian Weise’s crackling second collection is called The Book of Goodbyes—that’s “Goodbyes” plural. For it turns out there are so very many ways to say it. This is no ordinary see ya later/maybe next life, no firm and clear Dear John letter, though epistolary laments and last words pierce the reader as if Big Logos (the book’s nickname for the beloved) broke our hearts as well as the speaker’s. But this book’s smart, endearing, self-consciously self-dramatizing speaker is the heartbreaking heroine of the book, and she is NOT HAVING IT. That is, if she’s leaving, she’ll do it fiercely and with such full-throated articulation and insight that it won’t be easy to let her go....This book reminds us that the pain of love and loss, in the hands of a powerful wordsmith such as Weise, might just morph into passion, thrill, strength. And that love-suffering can bring us ever closer to lovability because through it we learn to connect, renew, transform.

Weise is also the author of the novel The Colony (Counterpoint/Soft Skull Press, 2010). Her other honors include a Fulbright Fellowship and the 2013 Isabella Gardner Poetry Award from BOA Editions.

Bibliography

Cyborg Detective (BOA Editions, 2019)
The Book of Goodbyes (BOA Editions, 2013)
The Colony (Counterpoint/Soft Skull Press, 2010)
The Amputee’s Guide to Sex (Soft Skull Press, 2007)