Dr. Jeanne Powell is an award-winning poet and essayist with five books in print. Her poetry collections include My Own Silence, Word Dancing, Two Seasons, and Deeply Notched Leaves from Taurean Horn Press. Her essays appear in Carousel, a book published by Regent Press. Dr. Jeanne’s connection with spoken word began with attendance at open mics. For 10 years she hosted “Celebration of the Word,” a popular weekly open mic in SF, and published three chapbooks of her poetry during that period: February Voices, Cadences, and Tangerine Dance. She established a micropress and published the work of 16 other poets. When she realized how many local poets were not being published, she created the Living Treasures series and raised funds to publish four poetic elders before they died, including Leonard Irving and Anne Bacon Soule.
Dr. Jeanne created events for National Poetry Month; she offered a workshop on independent publishing at SF Zine Fest; and she participated in a NWU panel on “the writer as publisher.” For six years she has been facilitating a weekly writing group at Mechanics Institute Library in SF. She taught in the Upward Bound Project for seven wonderful years, on the campus of USF. And for a decade Dr. Jeanne has written cultural reviews for several websites, focusing on movies and film festivals. The current website can be found here. She is the recipient of fellowships from the SF Writers Grotto (Rooted & Written 2022) and Anaphora Arts in Los Angeles (2023).
