About the Author

Jeanne Blum Lesinski graduated from DePauw University with a B.A. in French. While raising her three children, she worked variously as a freelance writer and editor for nonfiction publishers, a home service librarian to the Amish, and a teaching assistant in developmental English at a community college. She wrote the best-selling juvenile biography of Microsoft founder Bill Gates for A&E books and did research and translation work for the hybrid film Poe (and the Museum of Lost Arts) by MiShinnah Productions. Blum Lesinski’s poetry and creative nonfiction have appeared in many journals and anthologies including Ginosko Vol. 2, Poem, Revised, and Among the Happy Poets (Theodore Roethke Society). Her haibun “Embroidery” was a finalist in The Ekphrastic Review Women Artists contest, and her sonnet “Final Proof” was named for an honorable mention in the Helen Schaible International Sonnet Contest. In her poetry and prose, she often grapples with questions of constraint and freedom, the controllable and chaotic in poems that range from traditional forms to lyric prose.

“I use writing and more recently art to process my interactions with the world,” Blum Lesinski says.

“Along with writing prose memoirs and anecdotes, I gravitate toward poems that tell some kind of story or part of a story, though sometimes I go off on a more experimental track where narrative falls apart.”

She writes in a wide variety of styles. “Each group of images, ideas, stories needs to find its own form. After a time of what I call sponge time for soaking up life, written work or artwork surfaces, like apples floating to the surface when you’ve pushed them down to the bottom of the bucket when bobbing for apples. You have to go deep to get your teeth into them, and you come up cold and wet, but satisfied too.” 

She likes to share her work through readings, and while it’s been a stretch to get her introverted self into that arena, she hopes to do more of it because finding the audience is important to her. “I write and make art for myself and hope that the audience wants to come along with me. After all, a work isn’t truly finished until it’s found its audience.”