Teaching Awards 2007

Poet wins Temple University Faculty Award for Creative Achievement

Osman

(Photo by Joseph V. Labolito / Temple University)

Jena Osman can find the poetic element in just about everything she encounters.

From the periodic table to Supreme Court documents, she turns objects from the world around us into art.

“I’m very interested in the way language functions as a material that we use in a variety of ways,” said Osman, an associate professor of English and director of Temple’s Creative Writing program. “I use language, and its many registers, the way an artist would use paint.”

Her poetry is considered experimental in most literary circles. One of her most critically acclaimed pieces, “The Periodic Table as Assembled by Dr. Zhivago, Oculist,” allows the reader to use an interactive, web-based periodic table to create a word chemistry that is controlled by mixing different elements.

“It is Osman’s prolific and important artistic achievements that speak to her importance in the field of experimental poetry at the beginning of the 21st century,” noted Shannon Miller, associate professor and chair of the English department.

In her most recent book of poems, An Essay on Asterisks, Osman weaves language from Supreme Court decisions with poetry to create an innovative meditation on how law is often a matter of grammar, and how the words we choose to frame our actions can have serious consequences.

“We use language to create politics every day,” Osman said. “Poetry is a place where we can call attention to how the buzzwords that are repeated constantly in news media, political speeches, and history texts can change the way we understand what’s happening around us.”

In 2006 Osman won a Pew Fellowship, which will allow her to invest more time in completing a multi-media poem titled “Public Figures,” a poem/essay influenced by the statues that surround Center City, Philadelphia, and the weapons depicted in them.

In addition to her administrate duties as director of the graduate Creative Writing program, Osman is in the process of completing a libretto for composer Keeril Makan and compiling a forthcoming book of essays tentatively titled Documentary Poetics.

She is the recipient of numerous awards and grants including fellowships for her poetry 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. Her book The Character, published by Beacon Press, was the winner of the 1998 Barnard New Women Poets Prize. Her other publications include Jury, Amblyopia and Twelve Parts of Her. For twelve years she co-edited Chain, an award-winning and internationally recognized literary magazine, which she co-founded with Juliana Spahr. They are now turning the magazine into a small book series under the imprint Chain Links.

Osman received a master’s degree in poetry and playwriting from Brown University, and a doctorate in English from the Poetics Program at the State University of New York at Buffalo.

By Jazmyn Burton