Washington College | Jehanne Dubrow

Meet the Faculty

Jehanne Dubrow

Director of the Rose O'Neill Literary House
Assistant Professor of English

E-mail: jdubrow2@washcoll.edu
Phone: (800) 422-1782
Office: Rose O'Neill Literary House, Second Floor

News Features

Practice Makes Poetry

Jehanne Dubrow, assistant professor of creative writing and literature, does not believe in writer's block. Nor does she believe in inspiration. "If you don't believe in those things, writing becomes a job—but a really enjoyable job," says Dubrow, an award-winning poet and essayist whose most recent book, Stateside (Northwestern University Press), was published in Spring of 2010.

"I have a pretty rigorous schedule and try to write every day. Some days I'm rewarded by a feeling of effortlessness, the way athletes sometimes find themselves performing effortlessly. But you have to put in the practice. Inspiration is just muscle memory."

She finds teaching students to write both exhilarating and exhausting. She tells them to "read, read, read," because the best writers are "naturally obsessive and attentive readers." She advises aspiring poets to recite and even memorize poems they love, so they can "internalize the music on a cellular level."

In describing her course on the poetry of war, her enthusiasm for the topic is palpable. "I thought I'd start with the World War I poets. It's amazing how poetry has affected the way we think about war."

The child of diplomats, Dubrow grew up all over the world, and has known she'd be an artist since she was 3. She wrote her first poem—about a seagull and its enviable ability to fly—when she was 11. But she was just out of college when she realized just what kind of an artist she wanted to be.

She was managing a chain of coffee shops in Annapolis, "making a mean espresso," when she started writing again. "They were terrible poems, but after about a month she announced to her parents that she was going to be a poet." Since then she has earned an M.F.A. from the University of Maryland and a Ph.D. from the University of Nebraska. Her husband, Jeremy, is an officer in the Navy, and her book Stateside as well as a book of essays she is writing, are based on her experiences as a military wife.

She says that her students often have strange misconceptions about writing poetry—that there are no rules, that "everything is good if it comes from the heart." Her job is to show them that the distinction between good and mediocre writing is not as subjective as they might imagine.

"Some days I believe that I can teach writing," she wrote this past October on her blog, Notes from the Gefilte Review. "Some days I believe that I can't teach writing, but I can teach reading instead. Some days I believe that I can't teach reading, but I can teach empathy. Some days I believe that writing and reading and empathy are pieces of beach glass (because I live by the Chesapeake and the birds remind me of my closeness to water), smoothed objects, beautiful, but things we only find by accident when we're staring down at the sand."

Education

B.A., St. John's College, Annapolis, 1997
M.F.A., Creative Writing, Poetry — University of Maryland, 2003
Ph.D., English, University of Nebraska-Lincoln, 2008

Scholarly and Teaching Interests

Formal Poetry, Prosody
Literature of Witness and Trauma
American Jewish Literature
Holocaust Studies
Creative Writing

Bio

Jehanne Dubrow is the author of three poetry collections, most recently Stateside (Northwestern University Press 2010). Her work has appeared in Poetry, New England Review, The New Republic, West Branch, The Hudson Review, and Ploughshares. She is a recipient of a Walter E. Dakin Fellowship and Howard Nemerov Scholarship from the Sewanee Writers’ Conference, a Sosland Foundation Fellowship from the United States Holocaust Memorial Museum, and scholarships from the West Chester Poetry Conference, the Nebraska Summer Writers’ Conference, and the Institute on the Holocaust and Jewish Civilization.