Louis Jenkins
Selected Bibliography
The Well Digger's Wife (1973)
The Water's Easy Reach: Prose Poems (1985)
An Almost Human Gesture (1987)
All Tangled Up With the Living (1991)
Nice Fish: New and Selected Prose Poems (1995)
Just Above Water (1997)
The Winter Road (2000)
Sea Smoke (2004)
Four Places on Lake Superior’s North Shore (2005)
North of the Cities (2007)
European Shoes (2008)
Louis Jenkins (October 28, 1942-2019) is a contemporary master of the prose poem. Many of his poems have been published in anthologies, and Jenkins featured as a guest on Garrison Keillor’s A Prairie Home Companion several times. Though Jenkins was born in Oklahoma, he lived in Duluth for over thirty years and still resides in Minnesota with his wife.
Jenkins was awarded two Bush Foundation Fellowships for poetry, a Loft-McKnight fellowship, and won the George Morrison Award in 2000. He is a two-time Minnesota Book Award winner for Nice Fish in 1995 and Distance from the Sun in 2005. Nice Fish served as the basis for a play co-written by Jenkins and Mark Rylance that debuted at the Guthrie Theatre in Minneapolis in 2013. Other poetry collections include: Tin Flag: New and Selected Prose Poems, Before You Know It, and North of the Cities.