Jena Osman's most recent book of poems is An Essay in Asterisks (Roof Books, 2004). Her book The Character (Beacon Press, 1999) was the winner of the 1998 Barnard New Woman Poets Prize. Other publications include Jury (Meow Press), Amblyopia (Avenue B), and Twelve Parts of Her (Burning Deck Press). Her work has appeared in anthologies such as The Best American Poetry of 2002 (selected by Robert Creeley), as well as in literary journals such as American Letters & Commentary, Conjunctions, Hambone, Verse, and XCP: Cross-Cultural Poetics. Her poems have been translated into French, Swedish, and Serbo-Croatian.

With Juliana Spahr, she founded and edited the award-winning and internationally recognized literary magazine Chain. She has received a 2006 Pew Fellowship in the Arts, as well as grants from the National Endowment for the Arts, the New York Foundation for the Arts, The Pennsylvania Council on the Arts, and the Fund for Poetry. She has been a writing fellow at the MacDowell Colony, the Blue Mountain Center, the Djerassi Foundation, and Chateau de la Napoule. Osman received an M.A. in poetry and playwriting from Brown University, and a Ph.D. in English from the Poetics Program at the State University of New York at Buffalo.

Aside from teaching poetry workshops, Professor Osman teaches seminars on contemporary poetry and poetics. Recent courses have included "Documentary Poetics" and "Hybrid Genres: Visual, Sound, and Performance Poetries."