Jane Ormerod
Spoken Word /Poetry
Biography
Born on the south coast of England, Jane Ormerod moved from London to New York City in 2004. She originally studied fine art and exhibited widely. Changing to writing, Jane gained a MA in Creative Writing at the University of East Anglia.
Jane's work has been appeared, or is forthcoming, in US and UK print and online publications including 21 Stars Review, Arsenic Lobster (including the 2007 print anthology), Big City Lit, Brownstone Poets 2007 Anthology, CLWN WR, Dirt, eratio postmodern poetry, Erato, failbetter, Ginosko Literary Journal, Magma, Night Train, Poetz.com, Rogue Scholars, Stained Sheets, Take 20, Unpleasant Event Schedule, Whatever Literary Journal, Word Riot, Words and Pictures.
Thrush, a half hour prose poem, was performed at the Institute of Contemporary Arts in London and, more recently, at venues in New York and New Jersey. An anthology, A Cautionary Tale: Seven New York Performing Poets, was published by Uphook Press in 2008.
Spoken word CD, Nashville Invades Manhattan, is available from CD Baby or iTunes.
Jane is now a regular on the New York poetry and spoken
word circuit. Featured readings have included The Bowery Poetry
Club, The Cornelia Street Cafe, Galapagos Art Space, and The
Stone where in 2006 she took part in a performance of Gertrude
Stein's Pink Melon Joy and in 2008 readings from the
work of Blaise Cendrars and Walt Whitman. Jane is also the host and curator of the
occasional series Emotional Rescue at The Cornelia Street
Cafe
In January 2007, Jane toured the west coast - Vancouver, Canada, to San Jose, California - with Lisa Dewey as part of the Perpetual Motion Roadshow. She returned to San Francisco for the third time in February 2008 for more readings and a podcast for Mystic Babylon. Other 2008 performances have included the Salon des Mots series in Utrecht, The Netherlands, and a poetry-percussion evening with Lawrence Detlor. in New York.
Jane's chapbook, 11 Films, will be published by Modern Metrics in October 2008 with the launch at The Cornelia Street Cafe in New York on October 22nd.
Jane is a founding editor of Uphook Press.
"Her poems--discontinuous, imagistic, chant-like, wide-ranging in its references, sonically dense--challenge more traditional ways of putting a poem together. She made us sound old-fashioned, more, she made us sound artificial, our tidy methodical artefacts simulacra of reality, instead of the postmodern reality caught and then broadcast like a radio signal from her poems."
Jee Leong Koh, Stories of a Reformed Headhunter
Review of Jane Ormerod's reading at The Cornelia Street Cafe, January 18th 2008