Jennifer Bartlett was born in the San Francisco Bay Area and educated at the University of New Mexico, Vermont College, and Brooklyn College. She is the author of Derivative of the Moving Image (UNM Press 2007), (a) lullaby without any music (Chax 2012), and Autobiography/Anti-Autobiography (Theenk 2014). Bartlett also co-edited, with Sheila Black and Michael Northen, Beauty is a Verb: The New Poetry of Disability.

Bartlett has received fellowships from the New York Foundation for the Arts, Fund for Poetry, and the Dodd Research Center at the University of Connecticut. She is currently writing a full-length biography of the poet Larry Eigner. Bartlett has taught poetry and disability awareness at Willie Mae Rock Camp, United Cerebral Palsy, the MS Society, and New York Public Schools. She has also given recent lectures and readings at St. Marks Poetry Project, Hunter CUNY, the Dodge Poetry Festival, School for the Visual Arts, Brown University and Hamilton College.