Jacqui Germain is a published poet, journalist, and former student and labor organizer living and working in St. Louis, Missouri. Most recently, she served as the 2021-2022 Economic Security Project Fellow with Teen Vogue, reporting on issues of economic inequality at the intersections of race and gender. Winner of the 2021 Center for African American Poetry & Poetics Book Prize and the 2024 Kate Tufts Discovery Award, her debut collection of poetry, Bittering the Wound, is out and available now.

Germain has received fellowships from the Economic Security Project, the St. Louis Regional Arts Commission, Jack Jones Literary Arts, Callaloo Creative Writing Workshop, and the Poetry Foundation’s Emerging Poets Incubator. As a journalist, her feature profiles, reported articles, and political and cultural commentary have been published in The Nation, The Guardian, Teen Vogue, Artsy, Mic, The New Inquiry, and more.

Author Bittering the Wound (Autumn House Press, 2022), her first full-length collection of poetry, and When the Ghosts Come Ashore (Button Poetry, 2016), Germain’s poetry often involves an excavation of history and memory. Her work often seeks to challenge linear assumptions of time, progress, power, and experience through an intimate lens. Her poems have been published in numerous literary journals, magazines, and anthologies and she has performed and competed on multiple national and regional stages across the country.

Recent creative commissions include designing an original installation piece as the inaugural poet for PSA:, a St. Louis-based public art project, producing an original poem for The Pulitzer Arts Foundations’ 2020 Together/Apart series, and performing an original poem as part of the Center of Creative Arts’ 2019 Winter Rep performance.

With years of experience as a student and labor organizer, she has led hands-on trainings, guided long and short-term organizing campaign strategies, and helped coordinate direct action efforts with student communities around a number of initiatives. Germain has supported and participated in labor organizing around workers’ rights and living wage campaigns, and was deeply involved in the protest movement and grassroots organizing surrounding the Ferguson Uprising. Though no longer actively organizing, Germain’s approach to both journalism and poetry remain committed to and fundamentally shaped by organizing principles. She believes everyone has blind spots and is constantly striving to sharpen her analysis of the world around her.

Photo Credits: “Home” index background, “About” index background, and “About” page image by Jessica Page; “Poetry” index background by Chris Bauer.