Jax NTP

EDUCATION 

California State University, Long Beach 

• Master of Fine Arts, Creative Writing, Poetry
• Bachelor of Arts, English Literature
• Bachelor of Arts, Creative Writing
• Minor in Psychology and Gender Studies

EDITORIAL EXPERIENCE

• 2025 - present: Poetry Editor for The Ear Literary Magazine Issue 29-30, Irvine Valley College.
• 2016 - present: Poetry Editor for Indicia Lit.
• 2018 - 2019: Literary Arts Selection Committee for Out Loud: A Cultural Revolution: Arts Festival, Long Beach.
• 2017 - 2021: Fiction Editor for The Offing.
• 2015 - 2017: Reader and Reporter for Coffee House Press, Minneapolis, Minnesota.
• 2015 - 2016: Selection Committee for Scenarios USA: Real Deal, Cleveland & New York.
• 2013 - 2017: Poetry Editor for The Offing.
• 2013 - 2014: Associate Editor for Fat City Review.
• 2012 - 2013: Editor-in-Chief for RipRap Literary Journal Volume 35, Cal State University, Long Beach. 
• 2012 - 2013: Gender Section Essay Editor for Watermark Journal Volume 7, Cal State University, Long Beach. 
• 2008 - 2010: Editor-in-Chief for Queer Ink, Cal State University, Long Beach. 

In Bones & Tentacles: How To Pivot When You’re Paralyzed tentacles through anthropologist Marc Augé's concept of "non-spaces" to anatomize how the instability of language shapes the body, queerness, and immigrant guilt. Through experimental collage, ars poetica, ekphrasis, and epistolary forms, the collection uses cephalopod logic rooted in queer absurdity and immigration's afterlives. The poems examine how fragmentation and displacement become inheritances nobody asks for, send the banal to breakfast with the uncanny and the grotesque, and trace the tension between agency and paralysis through the language of the marginal and continual acts of self-sculpture that riot against self-erasure. This collection asks: What does it mean to live in the cracks of margins? What does it mean to tentacle beyond already existing marginalized categories?

PRAISE for IN BONES & TENTACLES: HOW TO PIVOT WHEN YOU'RE PARALYZED [Moon Tide Press]:

• The poems of In Bones & Tentacles are too skilled to be raw, and too ripped-open to be polished. They walk the edge I want my poetry to balance upon, one of fearless intensity and a dedication to craft that reveals a writer who knows who their literary ancestors are, and writes like a spell to charm them. This book has heart, bloody, pumping and perfectly designed. — Michelle Tea, author of Little F (Feminist Press).

• Jax NTP’s powerful debut, in bones & tentacles: how to pivot when you’re paralyzed, directly addresses an array of dazzling entities and beings, including “gender non-conformers,” “patron saint of unsung effigy,” and “wet streetlights and intimate things,” to name a few. The entire collection moves fluidly and confidently through NTP’s influences—writing after, or directly to, Federico Garcia Lorca and Frank O’Hara—deftly creating their seat at the living table of art and poetry. In rich, imagistic poems, such as “a nesting of queer anxiety in a cat’s cradle poem,” and “what if we can’t renounce citizenship,” NTP reckons with mental health, queer & national identity, as well as language as material, and the act of poem-making itself. This is a kaleidoscopic and darkly rewarding read. — Allison Benis White, author of A Magnificent Loneliness (Four Way Books).

• Enter the world of Jax NTP’s poems with a ladle and a scalpel. You will want to scoop up the language and dissect it, devour it and parse its palpable precision. Consider the titles: “dear reader/ the perfect subplot device is sold out” “two sculpins and honey jacks on the side” “June bug gum sole” “madness in all shapes of lavender” and, of course, “pin it.” Need you more persuading? Okey Dokey. These poems vibrate with images that seize and wed the disparate, populate with voice and vision, envelop with membranes sutured of chords and claims beyond the register. Proof: we are not post-pleasure! Let x = the “brusque push” and the “beauty of paranoia,” humanity in all its apple-crumbleness. To be carried around and quoted. I could go on. Must I? — Patty Seyburn, author of Jukebox (What Books Press).

• Jax NTP’s first collection of poems draws upon a transnational set of poetics and affiliations that should be instantly recognizable to readers who hunger for innovative rhythms. Demolishing the predictable boundaries of identity poetry, the passionate encounters detailed in in bones & tentacles: how to pivot when you're paralyzed  sizzle with astute vulnerability. No other poet has so many lines with incandescent titular energy! — Bill Mohr, Author of Holdouts: The Los Angeles Poetry Renaissance 1948-1992 (University of Iowa Press).

• In Bones & Tentacles is a linguistically rich exploration of different kinds of topography: a lover’s tattooed skin, the Los Angeles freeway system during rush hour, or the shifting masses of a floating jellyfish. Taking their cue from poets such as Frank O’Hara and authors such as Virginia Woolf, Jax NTP reminds readers of the simultaneous vulnerability and creative possibility of the queer body while never losing sight of the abruptly shifting vocabularies that define the body’s parameters. Jax NTP’s meditations on corporeality resonate with lyrical accounts of the poet’s mother, who appears here in the kitchen and bathtub, a carer and a person cared for, a presence where language and poetry find their limits and their deepest sources of inspiration. — Neil Hultgren, Ph.D. Professor, Department of English: California State University, Long Beach.

• The poems in Jax NTP’s collection are the suckers of an octopus that squirms up to its subjects, pierces them from several angles, then jets off in a smoke of mystic ink, reassembling page-miles away in freshly born forms. This book’s churning waters teem with gelatinous creatures—sweat-caked genderless invertebrates squirting over stanzas with a curious appetite for communication, for sex, for tropical fruits—who evolve into infinitely morphing abstractions to be discerned only once you squint hard through the bathymetric crush of the poet’s sonic and imaginative irrepressibility. inhale the culinary species sizzling in this poetry, digest these untamable feelings, and find your own mysteries wholly reflected at the bottom of Jax NTP’s maelstrom of meaning. — AJ Urquidi, Co-Executive Editor, indicia