Photo Credit: Beth Kukucka

Jan Beatty’s seventh book, American Bastard, won the Red Hen Nonfiction Award and was published in 2021. The University of Pittsburgh Press published The Body Wars in Fall, 2020, and in the New York Times, Naomi Shihab Nye said: Jan Beatty’s new poems in “The Body Wars” shimmer with luminous connection, travel a big life and grand map of encounters. Other books include Jackknife: New and Selected Poems (2018 Paterson Prize) named by Sandra Cisneros on LitHub as her favorite book of 2019. Awards include the Agnes Lynch Starrett Prize, Discovery/The Nation Prize finalist, Pablo Neruda Prize for Poetry, $10,000 Artists Grant from The Pittsburgh Foundation, and a $15,000 Creative Achievement Award in Literature, Heinz Foundation. Beatty worked as a waitress, an abortion counselor, and in maximum security prisons. For fifteen years, she directed creative writing and the Madwomen in the Attic writing workshops at Carlow University.