J.I. Kleinberg

An artist, poet, and freelance writer, J.I. (Judy) Kleinberg grew up in Los Angeles and moved north and south on the West Coast until she settled in Bellingham, Washington, in 2005. Along the way, she earned an M.A. in Design at U.C. Berkeley, had a long career as a fiber artist, exhibited her artwork at the Seattle Art Museum (and elsewhere), worked as director of marketing for a multi-billion dollar real estate company, ghost-wrote a memoir, and co-edited Noisy Water: Poetry from Whatcom County, Washington (Other Mind Press 2015) and 56 Days of August (Five Oaks Press 2017).

Since 1997, she has worked as a freelance copywriter, producing web content, brochure copy, blog text, and pretty much whatever her business clients require. Along with her personal site, chocolate is a verb, she has posted a regional poetry blog, The Poetry Department, almost daily since 2010, and co-produces the Bellingham-based SpeakEasy poetry reading series with Luther Allen. 

A three-time Pushcart nominee, Kleinberg writes both conventional-form and visual poetry. Her visual poems are collages built from phrases created unintentionally through the accident of magazine page design. Each contiguous fragment of text (the equivalent of a poetic line) is entirely removed from its original sense and syntax. The text is not altered (except for the occasional deletion of prefixes, suffixes, or punctuation) and includes no attributable phrases. The lines of each collage are, in most cases, sourced from different magazines, collected over time, and then assembled as the fragments connect to make poetic sense. (For more about her process, see the interview in The Journal of Radical Wonder.)

Kleinberg’s visual poems have been featured in two solo exhibits: The poem My trembling candle at Beyond Baroque, Venice, California, April 11 – May 9, 2026, and orchestrated light, at Peter Miller Books, Seattle, Washington, May 2022. Her work was displayed at the 2022 Skagit River Poetry Festival, in The Cutting Edge: Art of Collage in Asheville, North Carolina, in April 2023, and in Ink, Paper, Scissors: nature speaks in three voices, a three-person exhibit in Bellingham, Washington, in June 2024. In addition to private collections, four of her found poems are in the collection of the Fifth Avenue Hotel in New York City, where they are displayed in the McKim, Mead & White designed Mansion.