Jessica Lakritz

Jessica Lakritz’s dream is to live without manmade clocks. So far, it has been successful intermittently, and she has been able to work online in mainly freelance writing, tutoring, and editing for the past three years. Since graduating from Eastern in 2010, Jessica has lived in Milwaukee, Wisconsin, Buenos Aires, Argentina, Portland, Oregon, Zihuatanejo, Mexico, Playa del Carmen, Mexico, and is currently residing in Barcelona, Spain. This lifestyle has allowed her to focus on new ways to develop her passion for writing.

Her first poetry collection You Had Me At Topography was published thanks to a successful Kickstarter campaign. It is a story in poems whose structure is inspired by Julio Cortazar’s novel Hopscotch. Instead of just reading the collection from front to back, there is another reading offered. At the end of each poem are instructions telling which poem to read next. The idea of this dual structure is that, depending on which way you read the book, a different story will emerge. While the campaign is still running, she is now hoping to expand the project to include a custom soundtrack for the book, a goal that plays into her master plan to convert more of the population into poetry lovers.

In concordance with that plan, Jessica started a multimedia project called Sex on Sundaze, in which she writes her poems on people’s bodies, often in a manner intending to invoke a sensual and/or sexual response. The poems are inspired by the models on which they are written; the purpose of this is to connect the art with the process, the internal experience of the words with the external representation of it. The project as a whole is meant to bridge the obvious gap between poetry and the mainstream, as she feels that the positive effects of poetry on the human psyche are important and should be enjoyed by a much wider audience. It has progressed to address issues like body image, slut-shaming, and the spiritual crisis that seems to have plagued the globe as a result of overexposure to violence, porn, and the deceptive nature of “reality” television. Needless to say, sex sells, and the point is to get poetry out there and to dissolve the notion that poetry is art for intellectuals only. The project has generated interest from various venues, including interviews from Barcelona’s English radio station, The Grid, Seattle-based writing website, Prose, and the EWU MFA program’s literary blog, Bark, as well as web shout-outs from Tin House and The Arthunters.

Over the years she has been published in Cream City Review, Grist, Slate, Five Quarterly, and Third Coast, among others. Some of her recent publications also include:

• Tangerine Bones – Switchback
• Autosuggestion – First Class Lit