Jessica Turcat holds a PhD in English and teaches Gender, Women's, and Sexuality Studies at Oklahoma State University. Her latest book Hunger House won the 2023 Saguaro Prize for Poetry sponsored by Kallisto Gaia Press and is forthcoming spring of 2025.

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Her latest work is forthcoming in the 2025 Brill anthology Women Who Write Animals: Female Literary Representations of the More-Than-Human World as well as Educational Embodiments: Life Writing the Body (Research in Life Writing in Education Book Series, Information Age Publishing). 

 

Her poetry has previously won the Writers@Work Fellowship Competition sponsored by Quarterly West and University of Utah, the Rash Award sponsored by Broad River Review, and the Edwin Markham National Poetry Prize sponsored by REED Magazine. Her creative writing has appeared in San Diego Poetry Annual, Indiana Review, EDGE, So-to-Speak, Rewilding Anthology: Poems for the Environment and a number of other journals and magazines.

 

Jessica draws inspiration for her creative writing from her studies focused on mothering, body politics, environmentalism, and women's literature. She currently lives in Stillwater, Oklahoma with her handsome French husband, Eric Turcat, and their five free-range children. For more information, she can be found grounding with her menagerie of animals in the red dirt of her garden beneath the cool glow from a harvest moon.