Jennifer Clarvoe came to Kenyon in 1990. She has also taught at Harvard Summer School, Wellesley, Boston University and in the MFA Program at the University of California at Irvine. At Kenyon, she developed the English department's emphasis in creative writing.
Clarvoe teaches poetry workshops and specializes in modern and contemporary American poetry. In her course Prosody and Poetics, students learn to appreciate and analyze the formal strategies of poets spanning the range of the tradition in English through writing exercises of their own. In her course Poetry and the Visual Arts, students study the ekphrastic tradition ranging from Homer's description of the shield of Achilles, to Keats' "Ode on a Grecian Urn," to John Ashbery's "Self-Portrait in a Convex Mirror."
Her first book of poems, "Invisible Tender," won the Poets Out Loud Prize and the prestigious Kate Tufts Discovery Award for "a first or early work of genuine promise." Her second book of poems, "Counter-Amores," was published by the University of Chicago Press.
In 2002-2003, Clarvoe was awarded the Rome Prize in Literature by the American Academy of Arts and Letters, which allowed her to spend the year writing at the American Academy in Rome. In the fall of 2010, as director of the Kenyon in Rome Program, she returned to Rome with twenty Kenyon students for a semester of study and travel.
Education
1993 — Doctor of Philosophy from Univ. of California Berkeley
1983 — Bachelor of Arts from Princeton University