Faculty

Research Overview

Jennifer Grotz is the author of four books of poetry, most recently Still Falling. Also a translator from French and Polish, her co-translations with Piotr Sommer of Jerzy Ficowski's Everything I Don't Know received the PEN Award for Best Book of Poetry in Translation in 2022. Her poems have appeared in five volumes of the annual Best American Poetry series and have been published in venues such as The New Yorker, The Nation, Poetry, New York Times Magazine, and The New York Review of Books. In addition to teaching at the University of Rochester, she directs the Bread Loaf Writers' Conferences.  

Grotz’s Window Left Open examines how we can become strange to ourselves through escape, isolation, desire--and by leaving the window open. With poems full of the sensory pleasures of the natural world and a slowed-down concept of time, Window Left Open records the wonders of travel, a sojourn at a French monastery, and the translation of thoughts into words, words into another language, language into poetry.

The Needle, Grotz’s second book of poetry, explores both Polish and American twentieth-century poetry and its traditions. According to a Washington Post review (4/20/11), "Where many writers look inward and mine their private landscapes, Grotz sees the objects and scenes around her. . . . Attentiveness brings her poems—and the world—alive. . . . Grotz's perspective makes her work feel objective and insightful, even when she writes about family tragedies. Her ability to balance artistry and emotion results in buoyant poetry." The Needle was named as one of the best five books of poetry published in 2011 by NPR; it was also named the 2012 Best Book of Poetry by the Texas Institute of Letters.

Her first collection, Cusp, is informed by the phrase entre chien et loup, between dog and wolf, a French colloquialism for twilight. It signifies a brief instant in the blue light of dusk when the dog, who roams during the day, is about to retreat and when the wolf, who roams at night, just begins to come out. Cusp is a book about being in a kind of middleness, and it is also a book that aims to locate itself in terms of a literary tradition. The longest poem in the book, “Arrival in Rome,” for instance, is an imitation of Keats’s “Ode to a Nightingale” and grapples with the anxiety of influence of a young woman poet. While the poems in Cusp portray the world as divided, the poetic project of the book is to locate a cusp, a "now" moment between past and future, between domestic and foreign, between the random and the inevitable.

In 2015, she translated Rochester Knockings, a novel by Hubert Haddad that explores the life and times of the Fox Sisters and the birth of American spiritualism. She is also the translator of The Psalms of All My Days, poems of Patrice de La Tour du Pin.

Research Interests

• Poetry
• creative writing
• translation