Arts Directory

About

Artist Bio

Jennifer Bartell Boykin is the Poet Laureate of the City of Columbia. She was born and raised in Bluefield, a community of Johnsonville, SC. She received the Master of Fine Arts in Poetry (2014) and Master of Library and Information Science (2024) from the University of South Carolina. She is the author of the debut book of poetry Traveling Mercy (Finishing Line Press, 2023), and her second book of poetry Only Believe is a 2023 winner of The Hilary Tham Capital Collection and is forthcoming from The Word Works. Both are published under the name Jennifer Bartell. Her poetry has been published in Obsidian, Callaloo, pluck!, The Raleigh Review, kinfolks, Jasper Magazine, the museum americana, Scalawag, and Kakalak, among others. She is a 2023 Academy of American Poets Poet Laureate Fellow. An alumna of Agnes Scott College, Jennifer has fellowships from Callaloo and The Watering Hole. She is an award-winning educator who has taught English for 15 years and is currently a school librarian.

Artist Statement

My writing centers my experiences growing up as a Black girl in rural South Carolina. Combining personal, historical, and constructed memories, my poetry seeks to recover voices that have been ignored or lost while centering the stories of Black women and girls.

The communities in which I grew up provide a backdrop for my first two books: Bluefield in Traveling Mercy and Muddy Creek in Only Believe. Place takes on a role that transcends setting and becomes a character in the poems in these collections. These places are lush with nature and gardens, but also are the home of painful memories of death, grief, enslavement, and generational abuse. Cycles of birth and death abound alongside symbols of okra and gardening. My experience as a journalist also influence my work and I have some language from interviews I’ve conducted over the years with my grandmother and the elders of Bluefield. One example of such poem is the “Traveling Mercy,” the title poem from the collection of the same name. This poem has phrases from an interview I did with three elderly Black women in my community, which centers their voices, but also is told from my perspective as a recorder of their history, or as a seed, that carries on the legacy of their stories even after their deaths.

Growing up, I did not read many books that centered country southern Black women, and as Toni Morrison says, I set about writing the book I wanted to read. Zora Neale Hurston’s Their Eyes Were Watching God was one such book; it is a big inspiration for me as a writer, but I also knew that there were more stories out of the Black South that needed to be told. This has been the focus of my life’s work as a poet, and I will continue to center the Black woman voice in future books about being pregnant during the pandemic and what it means to be a Black mother in the twenty-first century.