Charles Jensen is the author of the poetry collection
Nanopedia and six chapbooks of poems, including the recent
Story Problems and
Breakup/ Breakdown. His first collection,
The First Risk, was a finalist for the 2010 Lambda Literary Award. He is the recipient of the 2018 Zócalo Poetry Prize, a Dorothy Sargent Rosenberg Prize, the 2007 Frank O’Hara Chapbook Award, the Red Mountain Review Chapbook Award, and an Artist’s Project Grant from the
Arizona Commission on the Arts. His poetry has appeared in
American Poetry Review,
Crab Orchard Review,
Field,
The Journal,
New England Review, and
Prairie Schooner. He is the founding editor of the online poetry magazine
LOCUSPOINT, which explores creative work on a city-by-city basis. He lives in Los Angeles and directs the Writers’ Program at UCLA Extension, the largest continuing education creative writing program in the nation.
Photo: David Franco
How did you first engage with poetry?
When I was 13, I lived on an island. There were 11 kids in my class. A poet came to do a residency in the school for a week and that was really the first time I started writing poems and learning about craft. The following year, my high school English teacher pulled me aside after class after we did a poetry assignment and encouraged me to keep writing, that she’d work with me outside of class. Those two people changed my life. One was a public school teacher who went above and beyond, and the other was an artist funded by a state arts agency to work with kids.
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