Jordan Blanchard

Jordan Blanchard is a poet hailing from New Orleans, Louisiana.

A 2018 alumnus of the Smithsonian Institution's Internship program at the National Museum of African American History and Culture, she is a voracious researcher and author. Her time at the museum was largely spent working on campaigns such as the search for the Clotilde Slave Ship, 1968’s City of Hope: the Poor People’s Campaign Anniversary Exhibition, the Hip-Hop Anthology, and more. Her time there taught her the value of not only learning Black American history, but honoring those who survived it.

She has been part of the University of Westminster since she did her BA in English Literature and Creative Writing where she focused on honing her poetry skills. In 2022, a year after graduation, she went on to self publish a chapbook entitled river muck, baby which was a collection of poems concerned with her passion for ichthyology and flora as well as her sense of self. 

She then completed two consecutive Master’s degrees in 2022 and 2024. The first was a continuation of her Creative Writing studies at Birkbeck College, University of London where she leaned into more experimental memoir work as well as some folk writing. She wrote a lot about reconnecting with the environment of her upbringing and tapping into the therapeutic potential of body writing. Her second MA was in Arts and Cultural Enterprise at the University of Arts London where she developed projects regarding redistribution of cultural education, establishing volunteer-based art houses, and opening a literature magazine for Black Queer poets.

In that time she also published work in Autograph Gallery and BRUISER Magazine as well as performing at the87press’s “The Tea” and elsewhere. She began as a reader for Split Lip Magazine in 2023 to keep her editorial skills sharp while studying.

She has now returned to the University of Westminster as a Doctoral Researcher. She will be writing a series of poems showcasing the intersection between her experiences with Body Dysmorphic Disorder and the Ecology of Louisiana alongside critical writing on the auto-ethnography of it all. She hopes to use her passion for ichthyology and the nature of her hometown to relate her experiences to her readers. 

She can be found wherever there is water, her work can be found in Autograph Gallery, BRUISER, Cheerio Publishing, Kelp Journal, the Kenyon College Young Writer’s Anthology, her Substack, and more.

I have historically written so acutely about the topic of the body that it is possibly hard to ascertain my position between the micro and macro.

I intend to write a new collection around autobiographic record, blending themes of eco-criticism, and incorporating auto-ethnographic research. Underscoring this writing of the self will be ecological study done with the help of various archives, critical readings, site visits, and interviews. My priority in writing will be to answer the question: What is at the intersection of the swamp and the dysmorphic body? Utilizing my knowledge of ichthyology and telmatology, I will be able to discuss my experience with the disordered living that comes with being afflicted with dysmorphia, the Black experience, and my sense of ethnogeography.

In terms of genre I will be experimenting with a combination of form and freeverse in order to lend structure to the collection. While sonnets have always been a resourceful tradition in my work, more flexible themes will do well to juxtapose the required linguistic precision in writing research based poetry. I intend to lean more into allegory, dirge, a variety of swamp eclogue, ekphrasis, hymn, palinode, and new age forms like Jericho Brown’s (2020) “duplex”.