Forthcoming & Recent Publications
Some of Jehanne’s new poems and essays are forthcoming in The Sun, Cincinnati Review, The Common, Gulf Coast, The Hudson Review, and The New Criterion.
Jehanne’s fourth book of nonfiction, Frivolity: A Defense, was by Columbia University Press in late August 2026. Frivolity is a philosophical exploration of frivolous pursuits, objects, and people. It attempts to understand why frivolity is so often tied to gender and sexuality.
Finally, Jehanne has been selected as the Mitchell J. Gerstein Distinguished Visiting Artist in the Anne Tanenbaum Centre for Jewish Studies at the University of Toronto and will spend part of fall 2026 in Canada, working on her book-length sonnet sequence, A Bit of Martyred Clay, which is inspired by the 17th century memoirs of Glikl of Hameln.
Current Projects
Jehanne has completed work on her eleventh poetry collection, The Brief Temple Taken Down, which considers the relationship between the health of the body and the health of the body politic. She began writing the manuscript after her mother faced two, life-threatening health scares: a dangerous spinal tumor and an emergency quadruple bypass. These events allowed her to reflect on the way that her mother—like so many mothers—is the spine of the family. At the same time, She began to think about the fragility of American democracy. The book is as much about the small, private declines occurring within a family as it is a collection that worries about the overall health of our political system. The body is a brief temple; so too may be governments and nation states. Poems from The Brief Temple Taken Down have been published or are forthcoming in Alaska Quarterly Review, The Southern Review, Ploughshares, and The New Criterion.
With scholar Jeff Doty, Jehanne is collaborating on Early Modern English Lyric: Poems and Poetic Craft from the Sonnet to the Heroic Couplet, a text that will offer a new take on the 16th and early 17th century poetry anthology. The book, which is under contract with Cambridge University Press, will include accessible essays, introductions of the poets, detailed footnotes, as well as creative writing prompts and a selection of contemporary poems that are in conversation with Early Modern pieces.
Jehanne is also writing book-length, linked sequence of sonnets. Inspired by the 17th century, Yiddish-language memoirs of Glikl of Hameln. A Bit of Martyred Clay explores a German Jewish world that no longer exists. Married when she was only fourteen, Glikl had fourteen children, twelve of whom survived into adulthood. Scholars characterize her work as the only known pre-modern Yiddish memoir written by a woman. The anxieties that Glikl articulates about the precarity of Jewish life in the Diaspora remain relevant to new readers. In her writings, Glikl chronicles the uncertain fortunes of her family’s business, cases of hatred and persecution of the local Jewish community, reports of pogroms emerging out of Eastern Europe, as well as ongoing fears of the Bubonic Plague.
