Author of A Camouflage of Specimens and Garments, Body Thesaurus, and Flinch of Song, all published by Tupelo Press, as well as Open Sail, published by Finishing Line Press
Pieces for Knock Wood have been published in The Collagist, Mid-American Review, Tupelo Quarterly, and more
Author has been honored with numerous prizes for her work in poetry and prose, including the Yeats Poetry Prize from the W.B. Yeats Society of New York (2018), finalist status in the New Letters Prize for Nonfiction (2018), finalist status in the Cleveland State University Essay Collection Competition (2017 and 2018), the Betty Gabehart Poetry Prize (2013), and the Tupelo Press First Book Award (2007), among others
Author's poetry collection Body Thesaurus was named one of the top poetry books of 2013 by Best American Poetry and runner-up for the Poetry Society of America's Alice Fay Di Castagnola Award
Author received grants and fellowships from the New Hampshire State Council on the Arts, the Barbara Deming Memorial Fund, a residency with the I-Park Artists' Enclave and the The Millay Colony for the Arts, and a fellowship with Writers at Work
Author's most recent poetry collection, A Camouflage of Specimens and Garments, (Tupelo Press, 2016) earned strong trade reviews, including a Publishers Weekly review calling it "positively bewitching"
Author is a member of the Academy of American Poets, Poetry Society of America, New England Poetry Club, and the Poetry Society of New Hampshire
A veteran author with strong connections in the literary community, Militello will seek blurbs and support from authors such as Beth Ann Fennelly, Sarah Manguso, Lily Hoang, Julianna Baggott, Alysia Abbott, Matt Bell, Kate Harding, Andre Dubus III, and Caroline LeavittIndustry Reviews
"These are hard tales of relationships gone haywire, the pull of love and the helplessness of mental illness and drug addiction. Militello makes order out of chaos sentence after sounding sentence, and succeeds in helping us at least try to understand human frailties. ... By the end of this contemplative and fascinating exploration, the reader may be moved to knock wood for good luck."
-Booklist
"Militello's part-memoir, part-poetic contemplation smooths out time and space so that we may see the All in front of us; it shows us that there is no such thing as an isolated incident, that everything we've lived continues to happen within us, that loss transcends love transcends time....She taps into a collective heartbreak, one we have, at different points, inflicted on ourselves by knowing better than to love the ones we choose to love."
-The Rumpus
"Knock Wood is a poet's memoir, filled with rich, beautiful language and metaphor. ... Militello's prose is haunting and sharp, her emotional nakedness a gift to the broken shards inside each of us."
-Mom Egg Review
"Speaking the music that exists within barren and uncompromising landscapes takes not only courage, but art. These Jennifer Militello has in abundance."
-Tupelo Quarterly
"With the lyrically textured and crystalline prose of a master poet, Militello's Knock Wood captures the elusive and mysterious nature of time itself, of our one dance on this earth that may not be our last, this urgent need of ours to love and to be loved, our propensity to fail at both and to try again, to suffer and to rise and to fall and yes, to perhaps live once more. This brave and mesmerizing memoir lays bare all of this with sentence after evocative sentence whose shimmering beauty I will never forget. Knock Wood is an absolute wonder, and Jennifer Militello is at the top of her form."
-Andre Dubus III, author of Townie and The House of Sand and Fog
"The twenty-nine short essays that make up Knock Wood delight and astound. Each piece is as multifaceted as a gemstone, deeply hued, image-dense, burnished by perspective, precise as a poet's tear. But each piece also links in surprising ways, creating a narrative that offers the pleasures of deeper meditations on time, memory, and destiny. Readers with Knock Wood close at hand are lucky indeed."
-Beth Ann Fennelly, author of Heating & Cooling: 52 Micro-Memoirs
"The essays in Knock Wood are perfect and petrified: to look inside is to witness the remains of transformation, once wood becomes stone becomes a blood that sins becomes an arrival, at a train station, and who will be waiting?"
-Lily Hoang, author of A Bestiary
