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Celebrating Jenny Browne at the McNay Art Museum Moroccan Courtyard and Leeper Auditorium, Friday, November 10th, 6:30-9:30 pm
Award for Literary Excellence
Jenny Browne
Honorary Co-Chairs
Dr. Vanessa B. Beasley, Trinity University’s 20th President
& Naomi Shihab Nye
Moderator
Dr. Rachel Pearson
Emcee
Molly Cox
2023 Inkstravaganza Committee
Wendy Atwell, Amie Charney, Eileen Curtright, Joey Fauerso, Meaghan Ritchey, Claudia Stokes, Burgin Streetman, Alexandra van de Kamp, and Laura Van Prooyen
Don’t miss Gemini Ink’s 23rd Inkstravaganza in celebration of the writing arts by joining us on November 10th in honoring Jenny Browne, as we celebrate her remarkable accomplishments as a groundbreaking poet, gifted educator, and community voice for the transformative impact of literature in our lives.
Jenny Browne is the author of four collections: Fellow Travelers: New and Selected Poems (2019), Dear Stranger (2014), The Second Reason (2007), and At Once (2003). A prolific poet and dynamic literary citizen at home and abroad, she served concurrent terms as City of San Antonio Poet Laureate (2016-18) and Poet Laureate of the State of Texas (2017) and, in 2020, was Distinguished Fulbright Scholar in Creative Writing at the Seamus Heaney Centre, Queens University, in Belfast, Northern Ireland. Other awards include a National Endowment for the Arts Fellowship in Poetry and the Cecil Hemley Award from the Poetry Society of America. She has been an integral part of the Trinity University faculty for 15 years, having joined the Department of English in 2007, where she currently teaches courses in creative writing and environmental studies, as well as co-directs Women and Gender Studies. In 2004, she received a prestigious three-year James Michener Fellowship from the University of Texas in Austin, where she received her MFA in Poetry.
Jenny Browne learned to walk on the grounds of Fort Sam Houston. After moving with her family to Maine and the Midwest, she graduated from the University of Wisconsin in 1993. She continued her travels and lived in Alaska, West Africa, El Salvador and the South of France. These formative experiences with other cultures and landscapes shaped her commitment to literature as a means of opening minds, cultivating imagination, and creating empathy for people and places beyond one’s own skyline.
For most of her adult life, Browne has brought communities together to strengthen literacy and celebrate literary arts. From 1998-2004 she worked in local schools, libraries, and community centers with support from the Texas Commission on the Arts, the City’s UrbanSmarts Program, ARTSSanAntonio, and Gemini Ink. She created and designed a K-12 curriculum integrating writing, environmental education, and the poetics of place that was piloted in Gulf Coast schools. From 2000-2003, she founded and directed the Good Samaritan Center’s Literary Arts Program on San Antonio’s Westside.
Over the years, Browne’s work has created platforms and opportunities for people to engage in writing and to explore ideas and identities across cultures, economic backgrounds, and ages. She continues to build local, regional, and global partnerships and worked with Borderland Collective to create Narratives of Resettlement, a two-year-long creative collaboration with refugee families.
In 2012, Browne traveled with the U.S. Department of State and the University of Iowa’s International Writing Program on two cultural diplomacy tours, teaching poetry in the Dadaab refugee camp in Kenya and the U.S. Embassy in Sierra Leone. She also completed a semester-long sabbatical in the Atacama Desert of Chile, and Oaxaca, Mexico, and continues to return to Belfast, Northern Ireland.
When she is not teaching or traveling, Browne writes in a hundred-year-old house in the historic La Vaca neighborhood where she lives with her husband, photographer Scott Martin, and their daughters Lyda and Harriet.
To learn more about Jenny Browne, visit http://www.jennybrowne.com/.
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We’re also spotlighting Partner Classes Youth Programming and honoring our Teaching Artist of the Year, Joyous Windrider Jimenez!
Past Inkstravaganza Honorees
Dr. Norma Elia Cantú
Gregg Barrios
Cary Clack
Carrie Fountain
Tomás Ybarra Frausto
Jan Jarboe Russell
Coleen Grissom
Nan Cuba
Carmen Tafolla
Barbara Ras
John Phillip Santos
Lee Robinson
Jerald Winakur
Steven G. Kellman
Abraham Verghese
David Liss
Sterling Houston
Robert Flynn
Wendy Barker
Naomi Shihab Nye
Rosemary Catacalos