Jen Fitzgerald is a poet, essayist, and a native New Yorker who received her MFA in Poetry at Lesley University. She is the host of New Books in Poetry podcast, a member of New York Writers Workshop, and was a Bread Loaf 2014 Conference participant. She teaches/will be teaching “Writing the Silence,” a workshop she created to help writers interrogate the synaptic leaps in their work, for LitReactor, New York Writers Workshop at the New York Public Library, and Split This Rock 2016. Her first collection of poetry, The Art of Work, is forthcoming with Noemi Press in summer 2016. Her work has been featured on PBS Newshour and Harriet: The Poetry Foundation Blog and in Tin House, Salon, PEN Anthology, and AAWW: Open City, among others. She is now in the DC area and at work on her memoir.
Late summer 2005 and everything’s under water. The news warns us that New York City could be the next New Orleans—flooded subways, ten thousand shattered windows.