Valentine’s Day Reading

Jacques J. Rancourt was born in southern Maine and spent his formative years in an off-the-grid cabin near the mouth of the 100-mile wilderness, the Appalachian Trail’s northern terminus. He attended the University of Maine at Farmington, where he received a B.A. in English and a B.F.A. in Creative Writing. Rancourt earned an M.F.A. in Poetry from the University of Wisconsin-Madison.

His first full-length collection, Novena, won the Lena-Miles Wever Todd prize, selected by Hadara Bar-Nadav, and was published in 2017 from Pleiades Press. A chapbook of poems, In the Time of PrEP, was published the following year as the inaugural title in the Chad Walsh chapbook series from the Beloit Poetry Journal. His second full-length collection, Brocken Spectre, is an editor’s choice selection for the Alice James Award and was published in 2021.  

He has published individual poems in magazines such as AGNI, Boston Review, Georgia Review, Kenyon Review, Missouri Review, New England Review, Ploughshares, Southern Review, Virginia Quarterly Review, and ZYZZYVA. His work has been featured in Poetry Daily, From the Fishouse, and the San Francisco Chronicle, as well as in the Best of the Net and Best New Poets anthologies.

Jacques is the recipient of a Wallace Stegner Fellowship from Stanford University, a Halls Emerging Artist Fellowship from the Wisconsin Institute for Creative Writing, a five-month residency from the Cité Internationale des Arts in Paris, France, and scholarships from the Bread Loaf and Sewanee Writers’ Conferences.

He has taught creative writing courses at the university level and served as an undergraduate thesis advisor, and he has worked as a middle school principal and English teacher. Additionally, he has led workshops for prison inmates, underserved youth at Upward Bound, and summer high school students at Stanford, Duke, and Northwestern Universities, as well as overseas in Thailand. (He also canvassed as a regional organizer for the Maine marriage equality and Scott Walker recall campaigns, made latte hearts as a barista, flipped burgers at Wendy’s, and faced his lobsterphobia at a seafood deli).

He now lives in San Francisco, California.

Kelly Gray is the author of Instructions for an Animal Body (Moon Tide Press, 2021), The Mating Calls//of the// Specter (Tusculum Review Chapbook Prize, 2023), Our Sodden Bond (MAYDAY Poetry Prize, 2025), and Dilapitatia (Moon Tide Press, 2025) and is the recipient of the Neutrino Prize from Passages North and the ArtSurround Cohort Grant. Gray’s work can be found in Witness: A Magazine of the Black Mountain Institute, Cream City Review, ANMLY, Rust & Moth, Cherry Tree, Southern Humanities Review, and elsewhere. Gray lives with her family in a cabin in the woods, nine miles and seven fence posts away from the ocean, and, in addition to her four other jobs, teaches poetry in rural public schools.

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