ABOUT

Jo Blair Cipriano is a writer, artist, and sexual assault survivor & advocate. They were born in 1992 on Nacotchtank and Piscataway-Kanawha land, and unequivocally support LANDBACK.

For their poetry, Jo was awarded a Brooklyn Poets Fellowship in 2019, after which they began interning with the organization. Until 2022, Jo served as Brooklyn Poets’ events manager, and co-founded and -organized its Staff Picks Reading Series, which highlights emerging writers from communities traditionally underrepresented in poetry.

In 2021, Jo won the Brooklyn Poets' Poem of the Year Award, and was shortlisted for Frontier Magazine’s New Voices Prize and its Industry Prize. A winner of two University of Arizona MFA Graduate Foundation Awards, Jo has also received support from Tin House, The Kenyon Review Writers Workshop, and the historic Hemingway House/Community Library, where they were a 2024 Writer-In-Residence.

Cipriano is the winner of a 2023 Academy of American Poets Prize for their poem “Bitch Ghazal.” A 2023 Pushcart Prize nominee and 2024 Best of the Net nominee, Jo’s work can be found in Poets.org, The Rumpus, Copper Nickel, Gulf Coast Journal, Sundog Lit, Diode Poetry Journal, The Normal School, The Boiler, The Southampton Review, The Avery Review, and elsewhere.

Jo is an MFA candidate in Poetry and Fiction at the University of Arizona, where they are a Southwest Field Studies in Writing fellow and receive death threats for their support of Palestine.