Jennifer Hambrick
Worthington, Ohio
Biography
Seven-time Pushcart Prize-nominated poet and photographer Jennifer Hambrick is the author of four poetry collections: a silence or two (Red Moon Press), winner of a 2025 Merit Book Award from the Haiku Society of America; In the High Weeds (NFSPS Press), winner of the Stevens Manuscript Award from the National Federation of State Poetry Societies; Joyride (Red Moon Press), winner of the Marianne Bluger Book Award from Haiku Canada; and Unscathed (NightBallet Press). Jennifer is featured by U.S. Poet Laureate Ted Kooser in American Life in Poetry, with Rattle editor Tim Green on Rattlecast, on the Ohio Poetry Association’s Poetry Spotlight podcast, and elsewhere, and her free verse and haikai poems are published in Rattle, The Columbia Review, The American Journal of Poetry, Santa Clara Review, San Pedro River Review, POEM, Modern Haiku, Contemporary Haibun Online, Red Moon Press’ A New Resonance 13, and in numerous other journals and invited anthologies. Jennifer has won many awards for her work, including the Sheila-Na-Gig Poetry Prize, Haiku Master of the Week on NHK World TV’s haiga/photo haiku series Haiku Masters, First Prize in the Haiku Society of America’s Haibun Award Competition, First Prize in the Martin Lucas Haiku Competition (U.K.), and four First Prize honors and a Special Award in the inaugural Heliosparrow Haiku Frontier Awards, among others. Follow her on Instagram at jenniferhambrickpoet and visit her at jenniferhambrick.com.
Artist's Statement
"Kire (Japanese, 切れ), "cut” or “cutting," is the engine of haiku. The cut between a haiku's two juxtaposed ideas/images creates space (ma, 間), a sort of "dreaming room," in which the reader can integrate the juxtaposed ideas into some type of meaning, literal, intuitive, or emotional. As a writer of haiku, I maximize the power of kire in imagery and juxtapositions that send a poem beyond the realm of the physical reality of this world and into the realm where impossibilities seem possible. There, the inexpressible embodies in language, in magical ideas, and in feeling.
Kire operates all the more powerfully in haiga (俳画, literally “haikai drawing” or “haiki picture”), where cutting occurs both within the poem and between poem and visual image. My haiga mine the expressive power of the double cut within the haiku and between poem and the accompanying photograph, joining poems with visual images that create new worlds where thoughts live between raindrops, where deep snow fills the bones, and where the heart can long to become an ocean. Ultimately, my haiga cut in language and image between the things of this world and the imaginative possibilities of other realms.
These realms are poetic terra incognita, spaces of expressive potential and powerful insights bounded only by the limits of imagination and fueled by the heart's longing to see what lies beyond the world we live in."
Seven-time Pushcart Prize-nominated poet and photographer Jennifer Hambrick is the author of four poetry collections: a silence or two (Red Moon Press), winner of a 2025 Merit Book Award from the Haiku Society of America; In the High Weeds (NFSPS Press), winner of the Stevens Manuscript Award from the National Federation of State Poetry Societies; Joyride (Red Moon Press), winner of the Marianne Bluger Book Award from Haiku Canada; and Unscathed (NightBallet Press). Jennifer is featured by U.S. Poet Laureate Ted Kooser in American Life in Poetry, with Rattle editor Tim Green on Rattlecast, on the Ohio Poetry Association’s Poetry Spotlight podcast, and elsewhere, and her free verse and haikai poems are published in Rattle, The Columbia Review, The American Journal of Poetry, Santa Clara Review, San Pedro River Review, POEM, Modern Haiku, Contemporary Haibun Online, Red Moon Press’ A New Resonance 13, and in numerous other journals and invited anthologies. Jennifer has won many awards for her work, including the Sheila-Na-Gig Poetry Prize, Haiku Master of the Week on NHK World TV’s haiga/photo haiku series Haiku Masters, First Prize in the Haiku Society of America’s Haibun Award Competition, First Prize in the Martin Lucas Haiku Competition (U.K.), and four First Prize honors and a Special Award in the inaugural Heliosparrow Haiku Frontier Awards, among others. Follow her on Instagram at jenniferhambrickpoet and visit her at jenniferhambrick.com.
Artist's Statement
"Kire (Japanese, 切れ), "cut” or “cutting," is the engine of haiku. The cut between a haiku's two juxtaposed ideas/images creates space (ma, 間), a sort of "dreaming room," in which the reader can integrate the juxtaposed ideas into some type of meaning, literal, intuitive, or emotional. As a writer of haiku, I maximize the power of kire in imagery and juxtapositions that send a poem beyond the realm of the physical reality of this world and into the realm where impossibilities seem possible. There, the inexpressible embodies in language, in magical ideas, and in feeling.
Kire operates all the more powerfully in haiga (俳画, literally “haikai drawing” or “haiki picture”), where cutting occurs both within the poem and between poem and visual image. My haiga mine the expressive power of the double cut within the haiku and between poem and the accompanying photograph, joining poems with visual images that create new worlds where thoughts live between raindrops, where deep snow fills the bones, and where the heart can long to become an ocean. Ultimately, my haiga cut in language and image between the things of this world and the imaginative possibilities of other realms.
These realms are poetic terra incognita, spaces of expressive potential and powerful insights bounded only by the limits of imagination and fueled by the heart's longing to see what lies beyond the world we live in."
