For her third poetry collection, Janée J. Baugher, MFA won the prestigious Tupelo Press Dorset Prize for The Andrew Wyeth Chronicles (Feb. 19, 2026), distributed by University of Chicago Press. She’s also author of the only craft book of its kind, The Ekphrastic Writer: Creating Art-Influenced Poetry, Fiction and Nonfiction (McFarland, 2020), as well as the full-length poetry collections, The Body’s Physics (Tebot Bach, 2013) and Coördinates of Yes (Ahadada Books, 2010).
She has taught writing at Northeastern University, University of Phoenix, Seattle Public Library, Interlochen Center for the Arts in Michigan, and Highline College, among other places. Hundreds of pages of her poetry and prose have been published in journals such as Saturday Evening Post, Mid-American Review, The Southern Review, Denver Quarterly, Colorado Review, Beloit Poetry Review, Tampa Review, Nimrod International Journal, and The Writer’s Chronicle.
As a cross-disciplinary artist, she seeks innovative ways to engage with the world. Her performance-art projects, for example, include collaborations with choreographers, dancers, and composers. Baugher’s poems have been adapted for the stage and set to music at the University of Cincinnati, Contemporary Dance Theatre in Ohio, Interlochen, Dance Now! Ensemble in Florida, Otterbein University, and the University of North Carolina-Pembroke.
One of her ekphrastic poems, “Gibraltar Not Gibraltar” was translated into thirty-three languages, including Bosnia, Fari, and Arabic. She’s been a featured poet at the Library of Congress and on Seattle Channel TV. Because of her position as the ekphrastic writing expert, she served as judge for the 2023 Frame to Frames ekphrastic poetry film prize (Fotogenia Festival, Mexico City).
