Writer and teacher Jennifer Freed lives in Massachusetts. Her first full-length collection, When Light Shifts (Kelsay, 2022), a memoir-in-poems exploring the aftermath of her mother's stroke, was a finalist for the 2022 Sheila Margaret Motton Book Prize (New England Poetry Club). Her chapbook, These Hands Still Holding, was a finalist in the 2013 New Women's Voices Competition (Finishing Line Press, 2014). Other awards include the 2022 Frank O'Hara Prize (Worcester County Poetry Association), the 2020 Samuel Washington Allen Prize for a long poem or poem-sequence (New England Poetry Club), and Honorable Mention for the 2022 Connecticut Poetry Award. Her work has been nominated for the Pushcart Prize, Best of the Net, and the Orison Anthology.
Less recently, Jennifer Freed's non-fiction describing her experiences as an English language teacher in Sichuan, China, was published in The Yale-China Review, and, in Chinese translation, in Cultural Meetings: American Writers, Scholars, and Artists in China (Guangxi Normal University Press).
Her articles about life in Prague in the 1990s, where she worked as an English language teacher shortly after the fall of the communist government, appeared in the travel section of The Boston Globe.
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On Writing and Teaching ESL (from an interview with The Worcester Review)
"Some of what interests me is the same as what draws me to writing. I didn't always know I wanted to teach ESL, but I think I've always been interested in other people, other lives, other ways of looking at the world. That was why I wanted to go to China right after graduating from college. I wanted to live in a place where I couldn't take my own attitudes for granted. I wanted to be jarred, to be 'other.'
"One of my favorite things about teaching ESL is the cross-cultural aspect of it. I love the way a mixture of nationalities in a classroom can lead to a certain kind of discussion, to a new way of seeing what had previously been so “normal” it was overlooked. For years I taught an advanced level (adult) ESL class, and I often learned not only about other countries, but also about my own—because students would ask why we do this or that or the other “strange” thing in the U.S. And I find that I like the challenge of explaining things, of helping someone understand something that previously didn't make sense to them.
"That goes back to writing. In both teaching and writing, you need to be able to imagine the mind-set of someone else, what they know and what they don’t, what obstacles they face. I wanted to do that in the poem “Lessons.” But you could say I was also writing as a way of teaching. The lessons I hoped to suggest, when I chose that title, were not only the English lessons, but also those that I had learned, and that I hope my readers can learn from the woman depicted in the poem."
(To read the interview in its entirety, please click HERE.