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Welcome
You can see more of my work in my chapbook [im]perfect witness and the anthologies listed in About Me.
Bio
Jess Challis: Writer and Artist
Author of poetry collection [im]perfect witness (signed copy order form) & award-winning artists’ book, body less. Writing instructor at the University of Utah.
Interview with 15 Bytes Utah Art Magazine
"When Words Fail, Materials Speak: The Hybrid Practice of Jess Challis" by Shawn Rossiter
For poet and book artist Jess Challis, the boundary between writing and visual art has never been a firm line. Her work moves fluidly across mediums—poetry, image, book objects, multimedia—guided less by genre categories than by instinct, material, and the body’s experience of making.
“I’ve never felt the two were entirely separate,” Challis says of writing and visual art. “I come from a family of artists and makers, where the lines between trade and creative identity (carpenter/sculptor, draftsman/artist, doctor/poet, mother/musician/actor) were often blurred. That afforded me a malleable definition of art and what it means to be an artist."
artistsofutah.org
Praise for Jess's Poetry
Michael Lavers on "Echo"
A poem of immense lushness and sonic power. EXCELLENT, in all caps. Wordsworth writes that a poem should produce "immediate pleasure," as an "acknowledgement of the beauty of the universe," and this is exactly what "Echo" does, seducing us with deer tracks, a lighthouse, melon-bellied trout, a rust red iris, and line after line of vivid and lavish details. A real bounty for the senses, but one that is not naive or ignorant of suffering. No, "Echo" is a poem of grief, but a grief infused with joys of the Earth. Such is the strange alchemy of all great poems.
Darlene Young on "Flying"
Prose poetry, lacking line breaks, relies on the juxtaposition of surprising images to charge the language. In "Flying," a tiny bird lets its bowels loose during its frantic effort to find an open window, this scene of desperation taking place against a backdrop of a birthday party. We are given what should be carefree images of a rainbow birthday cake, a floral couch, a smiling cousin, but the cake has been marred, and the couch sags beneath a dying grandmother. The cousin, we discover later, will commit suicide. As the poem flits birdlike from one topic, image, emotion to another, we finally sense through the overall mosaic a theme of cages, the frantic desire to escape.
Black and White Memoir
Vibrant Street Art
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