Want, the Lake

“If want is a lake, I learned to sail” writes Factor in her long-awaited second book.

poetry, craft work, audio

Jenny Factor is an archaeologist of object and mind; she is also a feminist, a mother, and a dog-lover. Her poem collection, Want the Lake, is forthcoming from Red Hen Press in Fall 2024. Her first collection, Unraveling at the Name (Copper Canyon Press), won a Hayden Carruth Award and was a finalist for the Lambda Literary Award. Factor’s poems and reviews have appeared in more than a dozen anthologies, including Poetry 180 and The Best American Erotic Poems (Scribner, 2008). Her work has been supported by an Astraea Grant in poetry. Jenny Factor is a doctoral candidate in English at Brandeis University, and received her MFA in Literature from Bennington College, and her B.A. in Anthropology from Harvard University. She serves as Lecturer in Poetry at Caltech, and is a former core faculty member and frequent visitor to the MFA in Creative Writing program at Antioch University Los Angeles, where she still strongly supports the program’s dual emphasis on literature and social justice.

Christina Pugh writes in Poetry Magazine, Jenny’s “verse forms sing with idiosyncrasy”.

Jenny’s work recently appeared on poets.org, and in the Paris Review and Prairie Schooner.

Jenny reads and speaks at museums, college campuses, stages, and bookstores.

Jenny blogs for the Best American Poetry site and the Poetry Society of America.