Jennifer Horne served as the twelfth Poet
Laureate of Alabama from 2017-2021 and was awarded the 2025 Hall-Waters Prize
for Excellence in Southern Writing. Raised in Arkansas and a longtime resident of Alabama, Horne
is a writer and editor of prose, poetry, and fiction who has taught creative
writing in a variety of settings, in university, conference, and prison
classrooms, abroad and close to home.
Her work focuses on identity, memory, and place, often seen
through the lens of nature. She believes in the power of poetry to connect people,
create meaning, provide solace, give joy, and honor mystery.
Her
poetry collections are Letters to Little Rock, Little Wanderer, Bottle Tree, and a chapbook, Borrowed Light. She also wrote Tell
the World You’re a Wildflower, a collection of short stories in the voices of Southern women and
girls.
A biography, Odyssey of a Wandering Mind: The Strange Tale of Sara Mayfield, Author, was published by the University of Alabama Press in 2024. Reviewed in Publisher’s Weekly, the book was deemed a “mesmerizing account” of Mayfield’s life. The review concluded, “Well-researched and compassionately written, this beguiling tale of madness and literature shines.”
As an editor, she
created Working the Dirt: An Anthology of Southern Poets. With Wendy Reed, she co-edited the
essay collections All Out of Faith: Southern Women on Spirituality and Circling
Faith: Southern Women on Spirituality. With Don Noble, she co-edited Belles’ Letters II, an anthology of
short fiction by Alabama women. With Jay Lamar, along with Katie Lamar Jackson
and Wendy Reed, she co-edited Old Enough: Southern Women Artists and Writers
on Creativity and Aging (UGA Press, 2024). With her sister, Mary Horne, she
edited a posthumous collection of their mother’s poetry, Root & Plant
& Bloom: Poems by Dodie Walton Horne.
She
has been the recipient of fellowships from
the Alabama State Council on the Arts and the Seaside Institute in Florida,
was invited to give the Rhoda Ellison Lecture at Huntingdon University, and was
awarded the Druid City Literary Arts Award.
She has been the Visiting Writer-in-Residence at Lenoir-Rhyne College and was
honored as the Alabama State Poetry Society’s Poet of the Year for 2020.
One
of her favorite quotations is from Virginia Woolf: “Let us not take it for granted that
life exists more in what is commonly thought big than in what is commonly
thought small.” (“Modern Fiction”)
