Jennifer Clement

Jennifer Clement studied English Literature and Anthropology at New York University and also studied French literature in Paris, France. She is currently the President of PEN Mexico.

Clement is the author of the memoir Widow Basquiat that made the "Booksellers' Choice" list in the United Kingdom and two novels: A True Story Based on Lies, which was a finalist in the Orange Prize for Fiction in the United Kingdom, and The Poison That Fascinates. She is also the author of several books of poetry: The Next Stranger (with an introduction by W.S. Merwin), Newton’s Sailor, Lady of the Broom and Jennifer Clement: New and Selected Poems. Her prize-winning story A Salamander-Child has been published as an art book with work by the Mexican painter Gustavo Monroy. Clement’s work has been translated into 10 languages.

Jennifer Clement won the Canongate Prize for her story A Salamander-Child. In 2007, she received a MacDowell Fellowship and the MacDowell Colony named her the Robert and Stephanie Olmsted Fellow for 2007-08 and she has twice been nominated for a Pushcart Prize. This year, Clement was awarded the National Endowment of the Arts Fellowship for Fiction 2012.

Since 2000, Clement has been a member of Mexico's prestigious "Sistema Nacional de Creadores" and she is also the recipient of a US-Mexico Fund for Culture (FONCA, Fundacion Cultural Bancomer, the Rockefeller Foundation) grant for the San Miguel Poetry Week,which she founded in 1997 with her sister, Barbara Sibley.

Clement was the Thornton Writer-in-Residence at Lynchburg College, VA and the Sandburg-Auden-Stein Poet-in-Residence at Olivet College, MI.

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Clement's work has appeared in numerous anthologies such The Best of The American Voice (USA), INUITS numéro 3, (France), Mexican Poetry Today, 20/20 Voices, Shearsman Books (UK), and Verse and the Universe (poems about science), Milkweed Editions, (USA). She is also included in the Encyclopedia of Contemporary Writers and Their Work (Facts of File Library of World Literature). The London Times, Akzente, The Herald, Poetry London, The Nation, The American Poetry Review, National Geographic, The Warwick Review and The Independent Magazine, among others, have published her stories, poems and essays.

The composer Jan Gilbert created an “Eleven Song Setting” of Clement’s The Lady of the Broom for soprano, flute, viola, and violoncello.

The French theater company Traits de Marque (under the director Marco Pejrolo) has adapted her novel A True Story Based on Lies for the stage and the play will premiere, in Paris, France in late 2011.

Jennifer Clement lives in Mexico City, Mexico.

The story "THAT WAS WHEN YOU COULD STILL BE KILLED FOR LOVE," nominated for the Pushcart Prize and published by The Warwick Review, can be viewed here.