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A green-blue book cover with black and white line illustrations of alpacas. The poet and title are in all lowercase typewriter-style font above

Jenny Blackford

Award-winning poet Jenny Blackford writes poems and stories for people of all ages, often with a tinge of magic, science, or deep time. And animals.

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A middle aged woman with blonde curly hair and red lipstick smiles at the camera with a wall of books behind her

Jenny Blackford


Jenny’s poems have appeared in Westerly, Going Down Swinging, Australian Poetry Journal and many more Australian and international journals and magazines, as well as the venerable NSW School Magazine, to which she is a regular contributor. Her poetry awards include firsts in the Thunderbolt Prize for Crime Poetry, the Connemara Mussel Festival Poetry Prize, the Long Poem category in the Science Fiction and Fantasy Association Rhysling Awards 2021 and the Humorous Verse section of the Henry Lawson awards, plus myriad placings, commendations, shortlistings and longlistings in the ACU Prize for Literature, the University of Canberra Vice Chancellor’s International Poetry Prize, the MPU International Poetry Prize and more. Pitt Street Poetry published an illustrated chapbook of her cat poems, The Duties of a Cat, in 2013, followed in 2017 by her first full-length book of poetry,The Loyalty of Chickens. Jenny’s third collection from Pitt Street Poetry, The Alpaca Cantos, was published in 2020, just in time for lockdown. Back in the Jurassic, she was awarded the University Medal for her Classics degree from the University of Newcastle. She lives in Newcastle, NSW with her philosopher husband and her feline muse/mews.

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