The Body's River A poem for Sunday I was born for betrayal— When my mother left me in the orphanage, I invented love with strangers. And if it wasn't there, I made it be there, until the crash, the revelation. They say blues is three chords and the truth— And poetry is long-lined lies and a deep dive into the body's costly river. The Atlantic Published February 2023 Jan Beatty talks about The Warhol Jan Beatty's Warhol Museum billboard Jan Beatty and Sandra Cisneros at the Miami Book Fair, November 17, 2021 Book Launch! "American Bastard" by Jan Beatty (w/ Ed Ochester and 8th Street Rox) Lotenero Art Studio Saturday October 23, 2021 - 7:00pm - 9:00pm White Whale Bookstore is honored to host the launch of American Bastard, the new memoir by local award-winning writer and poet Jan Beatty! She'll be joined by Nancy Kirkwood for a reading of Ed Ochester's poetry, and by local band 8th Street Rox for some tunes. As some of Jan's biggest fans, we can't wait to celebrate her and this book. AMERICAN BASTARD 2019 Red Hen Nonfiction Award Release date: 10/19/21 "I don't think I've ever read a book like this one. I hadn't known some live haunted by their own blood ghosts. It will be medicine for those wounded by their own births; and illuminating for anyone who thought they understood notions of home and kin. It's as if Beatty's lived homesick for herself. American Bastard is as brutal and beautiful as Beatty's poetry. A surgery of the self. Precise and invasive, exploratory and celebratory, debilitating and transformational." - Sandra Cisneros, House on Mango Street, A House of My Own: Stories from My Life Jan Beatty's American Bastard starts with a threat - with razor like prose she backs you up against the wall of your naive assumptions. A monumental work of wild innovative storytelling, wholly original, American Bastard would be unbearable in its pain were it not rendered with such exquisite craft and beauty. As a reader you're either in or out, I suggest you stay in for one of the decade's premier memoirs. - Sapphire, Push, The Kid American Bastard dares and succeeds at reimaging and redefining memoir as a genre where stream of consciousness meets essay, meets magical realism, meets reportage, meets poetry to create an epic mosaic only possible through the literary genius of Jan Beatty. And as if that weren't enough, an enthralling yet gracious exposé about adoption that confronts and educates us through a voice that is at times tender and broken, at times angry and fierce, but always unflinchingly honest with herself, the people in her life, and her readers. - Richard Blanco, Presidential Inaugural Poet, The Prince of Los Cocuyos: A Miami Memoir

American Bastard 2019 Red Hen Nonfiction Award Release date: 10/19/21 October 15, 2023 with Sandra Cisneros Teatro Bilingue de Houston Houston, TX September 1, 2023 - 7:00pm Ragged Edge Coffee House Gettysburg, PA August 23, 2023 - 7:00pm World Above Stockton University Noyes Art Garage Atlantic City May 12-13, 2023 Pittsburgh Literary Festival May 2, 2023 University of Delaware March 8-11, 2023 AWP Writers Conference, Seattle March 3, 2023 White Whale Bookstore Lefty Blondie Press Launch with Christine Stroud February 17, 2023 University of California Riverside Writers Week October 21-22, 2022 Geraldine R. Dodge Poetry Festival October 13-14, 2022 Workshop and Reading The Folger Shakespeare Library Washington, D.C. September 15, 2022 Aretha's Jazz Cafe with Allison Adelle Hedge Coke Detroit May 14, 2022 Pittsburgh Literary Festival April 24, 2022 - 2:00-3:00pm LA Times Book Festival April 23, 2022 The Poetry Center Passaic County Community College April 14, 2022 - 5:00-6:00pm PST (Virtual) Looking Back, Looking Forward: A Reading with Jan Beatty and Dana Levin The women writers who influenced their work. (Iris Jamahl Dunkle MC) wnba-sfchapter.org April 9, 2022 - 6:00-7:00pm EDT (Virtual) Adoptee Literary Festival EDT Nonfiction Panel www.adopteelitfest.com November 17, 2021 Miami Book Fair with Sandra Cisneros November 6, 2021 Red Hen Books Pasadena, CA American Bastard Launch w/Richard Blanco, Lynne Thompson November 11, 2021 (Virtual) Poetry Flash with Peter Kline, C. Dale Young November 7, 2021 Bazaar Cafe San Francisco October 23, 2021 American Bastard Book Launch Lotenero Art Studio White Whale Bookstore hosting October Fall Book Festival George Mason University, VA Virtual Reading October 7-9, 2021 Lit Youngstown Fall Literary Festival In Person September 30, 2021 Columbia College Chicago Virtual Reading 2022 Skydog Chapbook Lefty Blondie Press released May, 2022 2021 Jan Beatty's new book, American Bastard released Fall 2021 2020 Jan Beatty's The Body Wars released Fall 2020 University of Pittsburgh Press 2019 Jan Beatty wins 2019 Red Hen Nonfiction Award for her memoir, American Bastard 2018 Winner of the 2018 Paterson Poetry Prize

My Father Disappears Into Flowers The apple tree in the backyard with white waterfall blossoms: my father's body disappearing in his sickness down to 90 lbs, his hat floating on his head: my father falling into the clothes rack trying to buy smaller pants to fit - he's not gone The air heavy with waterfall, and him - vaulting down the front steps in spring: New York Times Magazine Published Aug. 13, 2020 Listen to this interview THE BODY WARS "Jan Beatty's visceral urgency and courageous truth telling is a gust of welcome fresh air. These poems are astoundingly alive!" - Tracy K. Smith "Jan Beatty is my essential writer, whose work always makes me feel less alone and less afraid. She is fierce, fearless, harnessing a fury that is as particular as it is familiar. Her startling imagery and dignified lines hold that energy tight. When I think of Jan's poetry I think: reliably and unapologetically feminist, unflinching especially in terms of violence, poverty, and sex in which women are subjects rather than objects." - Denise Duhamel "Jan Beatty's ... poems shimmer with luminous connection, travel a big life and grand map of encounters." - Naomi Shihab Nye, The New York Times "What would it be like to be stormless?" asks Jan Beatty early in The Body Wars, a collection riddled with bullets and natural disasters: fire storms, bush fires, fire tornadoes, flash floods, "deranged air." Man-made disasters, too: the heroin crisis, the aids pandemic, "Trump Care." But it is in the midst of crisis that Beatty finds her strength as artist, as witness, as poet. This is not a book that offers answers; rather, it offers important questions: "can I tell you that we mourned?" And "are there too many drowned trees?" These are the questions we all must be asking "as we crack into the mad ocean." What an extraordinary book." - D.A. Powell "The Body Wars is unsurprisingly concerned with the human body; the body as it moves through space, the body as a site of pleasure, illness, and frailty; the body as a communicator of truths and betrayer of secrets." - Kristofer Collins SKYDOG Released May 2022 from Lefty Blondie Press image copyright Carlos Hernandez, "New Country" PAST PRAISE FOR JAN BEATTY "Nobody has a better sense of the colloquial American idiom. Nobody among her contemporaries writes better poems about urban working-class life." -Ed Ochester, Pitt Poetry Series Jackknife: New and Collected Poems named by Sandra Cisneros as her favorite book of 2019 -LitHub "One of ten 'advanced women poets for required reading.'" -The Huffington Post