As the most comprehensive online events guide and resource for arts and culture in central Ohio, ColumbusArts.com offers a virtual guide through the Columbus art world with a searchable database of events, concerts, performances and more. ColumbusArts.com is an engaging place for artists and arts organizations to share what they do, marketed and promoted by GCAC. The ColumbusArts.com Artist Directory allows visual, performing and literary artists to create a profile and portfolio to showcase their work—for free—and enables art enthusiasts to easily search for and connect with them. Our monthly ColumbusArts.com artist profile series features interviews with a few of the many talented individuals who make up central Ohio’s thriving creative community. This month’s profile features acclaimed local poet, Lesley Jenike.  Jenike is an assistant professor of English at the Columbus College of Art & Design where she teaches poetry writing, screenwriting, American literature and film studies. She received her MFA in poetry from The Ohio State University in 2003 and a Ph.D. in twentieth century American poetry and drama from the University of Cincinnati in 2008. Her first book of poems is Ghost of Fashion (CW Books, 2009) and her poems have appeared in Poetry, The Gettysburg Review, Gulf Coast, The Southern Review, Sou’wester, Blackbird, Verse, Rattle, The Birmingham Poetry Review and other journals. She has received an Academy of American Poets Prize, and fellowships and scholarships from the Virginia Center for Creative Arts and the Sewanee Writers’ Conference. Her second book of poems has been a finalist twice for the Anthony Hecht Prize and excerpts will be published soon in an anthology by Waywiser Press.

“I teach poetry and screenwriting workshops, composition, American literature, and special topics courses—basically everything. I’m one of the luckiest ladies on the planet because I get to spend all day discussing what I love—literature and writing—and I get to have smart, insightful conversations with CCAD students; they are so unbelievably talented and their minds work in such lovely, mysterious ways. Creative writing workshops in particular are rewarding because I get to mentor student writers as they discover the intellectual and aesthetic intersections between the visual arts and the language arts. Writers, artists and designers have a long history of collaboration and cooperation and I get to be part of that tradition because I work at CCAD.”

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