Jeanne-Marie Osterman
Jeanne-Marie Osterman is the author of five collections of poetry. Her book, Shellback (Paloma Press), was named by Kirkus Reviews a top 100 indie press book of 2021, and won the American Legacy Book Award for Contemporary Poetry in 2025. Her chapbook, All Animals Want the Same Things, won the Slipstream Press Annual Poetry Chapbook Competition.
An advocate for human rights, she is also author of Who Killed Marta Ugarte? a collection of documentary poetry in memory of the victims of Augusto Pinochet. Praised by Chilean poet Luis Cruz-Villalobos, the book was translated into Spanish and published in a bilingual Spanish-English edition in Chile in 2025.
The recipient of a Ucross Fellowship, Jeanne-Marie has received three Pushcart nominations and was a finalist for the Joy Harjo Poetry Prize. She serves as poetry editor at Cagibi, a journal of poetry and prose.
COMING SOON
Narrative poems that face life’s griefs, absurdities, and defeats without surrendering hope and humor.
Jeanne-Marie Osterman’s searing poems capture the horrors of the Pinochet regime’s crimes against humanity: the secret detention camps; the vicious torture; the sordid mechanisms of disappearance. Her verses remind us all that we must never forget.
—Peter Kornbluh, Author of The Pinochet File: A Declassified Dossier on Atrocity and Accountability
...una de las contribuciones poéticas más honestas, valientes y necesarias a la memoria chilena desde fuera de Chile.
—Priscilla Gac-Artigas, PhD, Fulbright Scholar, Professor Emerita of World Languages, Monmouth University, NJ
Shellback is an elegy for a man who taught his youngest daughter how to “stretch a buck, drive a truck, / anchor a screw, win at gin rummy.” Jeanne-Marie Osterman toggles between nightmarish scenes her father witnessed during World War II and the smaller but no less affecting traumas of his final months in a nursing home. Her language is spare and colloquial, with moments of irony and deadpan wit that illuminate every detail. The arduous work of losing and grieving is beautifully preserved in these poems... Osterman conveys, impeccably and with unflappable grace, the hard-earned knowledge that “no one is only / their sins.”
—Mark Bibbins,
Author of13th Balloon
Poems & Reviews
The Madison Review / Horny Goat Weed
New Ohio Review / Review of SHELLBACK
London Grip / Review of ALL ANIMALS WANT THE SAME THINGS
Saranac Review / Done When She’s Young, When I Was Nine...
Liber, A Feminist Review / In Rio, After an Ill-Fated Romance
Wild Roof Journal / At a Stationery Store in Guayaquil
Loch Raven Review / Review of Who Killed Marta Ugarte?
The Latin Americanist / Review of ¿Quién Asesinó a Marta Ugarte?
Events
September 2026 / Ucross Residency
September 2024 / Poets House Reading / New York City
April 2024 / Vermont Studio Center Residency
July 2021 / New York City Poetry Festival / NYC
September 2019 / Book Signing / Brooklyn Book Fair
September 2019 / Poets House Reading / New York City