Jenny Isaacs

Simultaneously precocious and a late bloomer, Jenny graduated from the Johns Hopkins University at the age of 19 with an honors degree in the Writing Seminars. She studied poetry with David St. John, Daniel Mark Epstein and Peter Sacks, and earned the Three Arts Club of Homeland Award for outstanding achievement. Forty years later, her first collection, The Argument of Time, is forthcoming in June 2026 from Finishing Line Books, which selected it as a semi-finalist in their Open Chapbook Competition.

In the interim she married the first person she ever spoke to on the Hopkins campus, raised three daughters with him, worked as a middle school teacher & administrator, and founded & directed three nonprofits, including a Montessori school and an immigrant rights organization offering legal support to community members threatened by detention & deportation. Now (mercifully) retired from legal immigration work, she lives with her husband just a few doors down from her octogenarian parents on a creek off the Chesapeake Bay.

In retirement she returned to writing and publishing poetry—that's the late blooming part of the story. In 2025 my work appeared in ten journals, including Pedestal, Thimble Literary Magazine, and Mezzo Cammin, and she already has a number of poems scheduled for publication in 2026 in print (Schuylkill Valley Journal, Blue Unicorn) and online (Certain Age, ൪uartet). Unlike the older work assembled in The Argument of Time the poems in Latin Names range from vintage to brand-new.