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. In 2009 she was nominated for a Pushcart Prize.

Clement was awarded Mexico's prestigious "Sistema Nacional de Creadores" grant 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 for the fall semester 2009 and she has been named the Sandburg-Auden-Stein Poet-in-Residence at Olivet College for 2011.

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Clement's work has appeared in numerous anthologies such The Best of The American Voice and she is 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. Recently, the composer Jan Gilbert created an “Eleven Song Setting” of Clement’s The Lady of the Broom for soprano, flute, viola, and violoncello.

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.