About Jeanie Thompson
Best Selling Author
Poet and essayist Jeanie Thompson is the author of The Myth of Water: Poems from the Life of Helen Keller, The Seasons Bear Us, White for Harvest: New and Selected Poems, Witness, Litany for a VanishingLandscape, How to Enter the River, and Lotus and Psalm. Her poems have been published widely in journals and anthologies for many years. Her essays on poetry and the writing life have also been published in Old Enough: Southern Women Writers and Artists on Creativity and Aging,Tributaries, Creativity and Compassion, Whatever Remembers Us, High Horse, Working the Dirt, All Out of Faith, The Best of Crazyhorse, and The Southern Poetry Anthology: Volume X: Alabama. While a student in the University of Alabama’s MFA Creative Writing, Jeanie led her classmates in founding the Black Warrior Review literary journal. She served as editor in chief for BWR’S first four issues (1974-76).
In 1993 Jeanie founded the Alabama Writers’ Forum, a partnership program of the Alabama State Council on the Arts. The Forum promotes writers and writing and is a strong supporter of literary arts education. Its award-winning Writing Our Stories program for juvenile offenders takes place on three Department of Youth Services campuses..
Jeanie retired as Executive Director Emerita in 2023. In June 2024, Jeanie received the Albert B. Head Legacy Award for her work as a literary arts advocate and award-winning poet. The Award recognizes public officials, arts patrons, or arts educators who have empowered arts to thrive in their community, creating lasting importance for future generations in Alabama and beyond. Jeanie has been a poetry faculty member in the Naslund-Mann Graduate School of Writing Program since 2002.
Since 2002, she has been a member of the poetry faculty of Spalding University’s lo-res MFA Writing Program in Louisville, Kentucky. She teaches poetry writing workshops, gives craft lectures, and has served as a guest poetry editor of The Louisville Review.
Spalding’s low-residency MFA in Writing program offers serious intellectual stimulation in a non-competitive, emotionally supportive atmosphere. Jeanie explains, “We are here to help one another become better writers. This ethos permeates everything we do. Please let me know if you would like to learn more about the residencies, both in Louisville and abroad, and the independent study concept of Spalding’s MFA featuring one-on-one mentor-student work, and more.”
See mention of Jeanie’s poetry on Best-Poems.net.
Origin of “The Myth of Water”
My exploration of Alabama-born Helen Keller has taught me the power of developing an intimate relationship with a figure from history. I read biographies and other accounts of her life, but her own writing — her journal of the six months immediately following Anne Sullivan Macy’s death and the letters she sent back to the USA after visiting the devastation in Japan following the atomic bombs — led me to know her heart and to imagine the woman she was. I hope these poems give a sketch of who Helen Keller became, and open a window into the heart she gave to the world. Love, compassion for others, and the search for justice motivated her above all else.
— Jeanie Thompson
About Writing…
As a woman living in the southeastern United States, does my art, my poetry, help me consider my life, my aging process, my community?
I don’t think about it that analytically. I just know that every day that I write and reaffirm my being, I feel better, more useful.
It is primarily about stronger mental health, Being less self -focused, more expansive, and happier.
When I go for long stretches without writing, just thinking about writing, I begin to feel less healthy and perhaps older.
I’m mentally stoop, but revision is the word I would use to describe what poetry does most for me.
It allows me to revise my life in an objective way that frees me from the expectations of the social universe, that is, an older woman should or should not do this or that.
And lets me exist in a place that is ruled only by how often I pick up a pen or sit down to a keyboard.
It is completely up to me how often I write, revise, and continue to become a poet.
Is writing poetry an elixir of life? Maybe it’s a mind game, perhaps; it doesn’t matter.
I feel its necessity in my life. I trust what I know as a writer, poet, and citizen of the world, and hope not to run from it.
In some ways, writing poetry is an act of generosity, distilling those moments of pure joy or exploration into poems that others can experience and I can relive.
It is a generous becoming, and the first soul who experiences the gift is me.
— Jeanie Thompson (an excerpt from the essay, “The Generous Becoming” in Old Enough; Southern Women Writers and Artists on Creativity and Aging (New South Books, An Imprint of the University of Georgia Press, 2024)
Honors
2025 recipient of Joanne Sloane National Award for the Encouragement of Writing
Jeanie was honored at the 2025 Southern Christian Writers Conference with the Joanne Sloan National Award for the Encouragement of Writing. This annual award recognizes individuals who have a long and eminent record of encouraging writers honoring her work as founder and leader of Alabama Writer’s Forum.
Albert B. Head Legacy Award
In 2024, Jeanie was honored for her work as a literary arts advocate and poet.
The Albert B. Head Legacy Award recognizes public officials, arts patrons, or arts educators who have empowered arts to thrive in their community, creating lasting importance for future generations in Alabama and beyond.
Myth of Water receives “Entry of Note”
The Myth of Water: Poems From the Life of Helen Keller (University of Alabama Press, 2016) was awarded an “entry of note” by the judges of the 2017 IPPY Awards in Poetry. IPPY is the Independent Publishers Awards, and is one of the most prestigious awards for creative writers.
