jeanette beebe

Bio

Jeanette Beebe (🐝🐝) is a poet and journalist, sometimes in that order.

She was a finalist for the Iowa Review Award in Poetry and a semifinalist for the 92Y Discovery Poetry Contest. Her poems have appeared in The Journal, Salamander, Sixth Finch, Juked, Bayou Magazine, Poet Lore, and elsewhere.

Nominated for Best New Poets and a Pushcart Prize, Jeanette formerly served as social media manager for Nat. Brut, winner of a Whiting Literary Magazine Prize.

She holds an A.B. in English with certificates in Creative Writing and Gender & Sexuality Studies from Princeton, where she was lucky enough to write a poetry thesis advised by Tracy K. Smith.

At Princeton, she was co-editor in chief of Prism Magazine, and she served as a Poetry Reader for the Nassau Literary Review. She was awarded the A. Scott Berg Fellowship, and she received funding from the Peter B. Lewis Summer Fund, the Fred Fox ‘39 Fund, the Dean’s Fund for Study Abroad, and the Program in Judaic Studies. She won the University Center for Human Values Short Movie Prize and the Morris W. Croll Poetry Prize. She received an Honorable Mention for the Emily Ebert Junior Prize.

She got into poetry through spoken word, with stage-to-page poems stapled into zines — a journey that led her to the Brave New Voices Poetry Slam as a member of Minneapolis/St. Paul’s inaugural team.

At age 15, Jeanette founded Moving ForWords Productions, a literary project inspired by her hometown poetry slam community in Des Moines, Iowa. As a member of Teens Rock the Mic (alongside a stellar group of poets including First Wave scholars Kelsey Van Ert and Danez Smith), she won the opportunity to represent Minneapolis/St. Paul at the Brave New Voices International Youth Poetry Slam Festival in San Francisco. This work was featured in Literacy Tools in the Classroom (National Writing Project + Teachers College). Twin Cities’ PBS station produced a documentary on Quest for the Voice, and the group was also featured on the radio and web by Minnesota Public Radio.

A copy of one of her spoken word poetry chapbooks made it into the zine collection of In Other Words, a bookstore in Portland.

Workshops

92Y: Andrés Cerpa, Tina Chang, Mark Doty, Emily Fragos, Kathleen Ossip.

Drake University: Jody Swilky.

Iowa Writers’ Workshop Summer Session: James Galvin.

Iowa Young Writers’ Studio: Aaron McCollough.

Princeton Arts Council: Tim Craven, Jean Hollander.

Princeton University: Paul Muldoon, Tracy K. Smith, C.K. Williams, Susan Wheeler.

Poets House: Hettie Jones, Ada Limón, Kamilah Aisha Moon, Cindy Juyoung Ok, Wendy Xu.

Readings & Slams

Brave New Voices (San Francisco) * Café Vivian (Princeton) * Capri Theater (Minneapolis) * Green Mill (Chicago) * Healing Arts Center (Omaha) * Hinds Plaza (Princeton) * Java Joes (Des Moines) * La Boheme Café (Ames, IA) * James M. Stewart Theater (Princeton) * Mars Café (Des Moines) * Marshalltown Public Library (Marshalltown, IA) * Mercury Café (Denver) * Midnight Drip Coffee House (Oskaloosa, IA) * Richardson Auditorium (Princeton) * Rider University (Lawrenceville, NJ) * Zanzibar's Coffee Adventure (Des Moines)

• “Jeanette Beebe ’14 on COVID-19 journalism, poetry, and ‘how to be terrible’,” The Daily Princetonian, March 7, 2021.

• “In the Field: Conversations with our Contributors — Jeanette Beebe,” Water Stone Review, September 9, 2020.

Poems