Photo: Marvin KaplanJayne Benjulian is the author of Five Sextillion Atoms. She has always been a writer. She grew up in suburban backyards near New York City and spent summers swimming in the Atlantic Ocean. Drawn to coastlines, she also lived on the West Coast—on an island, in a cabin in the hills, and a house under the redwoods. She began writing as a young girl, leaving letters under the mattress to read years later and see who she had been. Her work appears in numerous literary and performance journals, including Agni, Barrow Street, The Cortland Review, Poet Lore, Nimrod, HowlRound, Women’s Review of Books, Spillway and Poetry Daily. She was shortlisted for the Bridport Prize and the James Hearst Poetry Prize.
Jayne’s careers have been as varied and many as places she has lived: she served as chief speechwriter at Apple, investigator for the public defender in King County, Washington, and director of new play development at Magic Theater. She was an Ossabaw Island Project Fellow; teaching fellow at Emory University; lecturer in the Graduate Program in Theater at San Francisco State University; and Fulbright Teaching Fellow in Lyon, France. She earned an MA at Emory University and an MFA from the Warren Wilson Program for Writers.
Jayne is an inspired coach for artists and writers. She founded the Berkshire Writers Project ®, where she helps artists develop their book projects, coaches poets and prose writers and teaches the writing and performance of poetry and monologue.
MEDIA
Download high-resolution images:
