About
Jan Freeman is the author of three books of poetry and the founder and former director of Paris Press (1995–2018), which is now an imprint of Wesleyan University Press, with archives located at the Amherst College Frost Library. She is the recipient of two MacDowell Fellowships, the Spiral Shell Fellowship at the Virginia Center for the Creative Arts/Moulin a Nef, and an Associateship at the Five College Women’s Studies Research Center in Amherst, Massachusetts. Her poem “Single Helix,” was finalist for the North American Review’s James Hearst Poetry Prize and appeared in NAR’s spring 2024 issue. Her new manuscript of poetry, The Odyssey of Yes and No, is a 2024 finalist for Four Way Books’ Larry Levis Prize.
Photo by Kamini Avril
Poetry
Jan’s recent book of poetry, Blue Structure (Calypso Editions), was nominated for the Kingsley Tufts Award, and championed by Ilya Kaminsky. She is the author of Simon Says, nominated for the National Book Critics Circle Award; Hyena; and the chapbook Autumn Sequence. She has been awarded fellowships from MacDowell, Moulin a Nef, the Virginia Center for the Creative Arts, the Wurlitzer Foundation, and other artist residencies. Her poems have appeared in many anthologies and journals, including the Academy of American Poets Poem-a-Day, American Poetry Review, The American Voice, Barrow Street, The Brooklyn Rail, The Chelsea Review, Hole in the Head Literary Review, The Massachusetts Review, Nine Mile, North American Review, On the Seawall, Persimmon Tree, Plume, POETRY, Poets of the Resistance, Prairie Schooner, Salamander, The Southern Review, and The Women's Review of Books. Her work is forthcoming in Painted Bride Quarterly and Keystone: Contemporary Poets on Pennsylvania .
Publishing Background
Jan founded Paris Press in 1995 to bring back into print Muriel Rukeyser's groundbreaking prose work The Life of Poetry. During the next 23 years, she published groundbreaking yet overlooked literature by women, and she choreographed educational-outreach programs nationally to educate the public about each Paris Press book and author. Paris Press titles include On Being Ill with Notes from Sick Rooms by Virginia Woolf; Open Me Carefully by Emily Dickinson; NBCC award-winning Ordinary Words and Simplicity by Ruth Stone; Solitude of Self by Elizabeth Cady Stanton; Visa for Avalon, Player’s Boy, and The Heart to Artemis by Bryher; Tell Me Another Morning by Zdena Berger; The Bosnia Elegies by Adrian Oktenberg; The Orgy and Houdini: A Musical by Muriel Rukeyser, Sisters: An Anthology, and many other works.
Paris Press books received critical acclaim from The New York Times, The New Yorker, The New York Review of Books, National Public Radio, The LA Times, The Washington Post, Publishers Weekly, Booklist, and numerous other national and international review venues. Before founding Paris Press, Freeman wrote and edited secondary-school literature and language arts textbooks. She learned the A, B, C’s of publishing at Crown Publishers and Cosmopolitan Magazine. Jan received her MFA from New York University, where she studied with Galway Kinnell, Sharon Olds, and Ruth Stone, and she earned her BA from Vassar College.
In 2018, Paris Press was acquired by Wesleyan University Press, and the Press’s and Jan’s archives were acquired by the Amherst College Frost Library. She lives in western Massachusetts, where she provides coaching and mentoring for poets and writers of all levels, as well as editorial services and manuscript development and consultations to writers, poets, and artists. She is a Poet Educator for Mass Poetry, runs the MASS MoCA Writing Through Art Poetry Retreats, and offers ongoing weekly Monday-night Zoom workshops for new and experienced poets.
To contact Jan Freeman for workshops, retreats, poetry readings, and lectures, please write to janfreemanpoetry@gmail.com.
To inquire about coaching and mentoring, manuscript consultations, development, and editorial services for hybrid projects or works of fiction, nonfiction, and poetry, click here or write to janfreemaneditorial@gmail.com.