Who I Am

Jeanetta Calhoun Mish is a writer, scholar, professor, and editor of Mongrel Empire Press. She earned her Ph.D. in American Studies with an emphasis on contemporary American poetry and working-class studies. Her poetry collection, Work Is Love Made Visible, published by West End Press  in March 2009, won three major awards in 2010. Jeanetta’s first collection of poetry, Tongue Tied Woman, won the Edda Poetry Chapbook Competition for Women in 2002. She has participated in poetry readings and workshops for more than 20 years, including repeat performances as a founding member of the Woody Guthrie Poets at the Woody Guthrie Free Folk Festival in Okemah, Oklahoma. Other venues include Telluride Institute’s Native American Writers Program; The Taos Poetry Circus Invitational Reading; Red Dirt Book Festival; Scissortail Creative Writing Festival, C.W. Post Poetry Center at LIU; New York State Writers Institute Community Voices Series and Readings Against the End of the World, both in Albany, NY; and The Knitting Factory in New York City.  She has published recently in LABOR: Studies in Working Class History of the Americas and Oklahoma Today. Her essay, “This Oklahoma We Call Home,” appears in the Fall/Winter 2008 issue of Crosstimbers. She currently lives in Albuquerque, NM and is a member of the faculty of the Red Earth Creative Writing MFA Program at Oklahoma City University.