Hello and welcome to my website : ). My name is Juliet and I am a poet. I engage in a variety of activities that I view as extensions of my poetry, like posting on Instagram, and explaining if something is Business or Poetry. I also co-founded and curate Spit Poetry, a reading and open mic series in Philadelphia, the city in which I live. We don’t have a website or a social media account or anything like that, I just post on my Instagram page when there’s an event coming up and they have it on the calendar at Upstairs Abyssinia where we usually host the readings. Recently on my Instagram page I have been reporting on New Jersey sinkholes, documenting the decay of pumpkins in my neighborhood, giving tours of corners, and interpreting the vibes of various trees. I would say my Instagram page is probably the best place to stay up on my work because I experience a calling to Post, but if you want to read my work it’s all linked in the “Words” tab of my website, and if you want to hear or watch me read there are some recorded readings in the “Recorded Readings” tab of my website. That’s all pretty intuitive but I’m just putting it here because this is the “About” tab of my website and this is some stuff about me.
I got my MFA in Creative Nonfiction from Rutgers University-Camden in May 2023, which actually I was paid to do. This involved teaching undergrads writing composition and creative writing. I have some amazing Rate My Professors reviews in case you care about that. I also taught one workshop for the Rutgers-Camden Writer’s House in summer 2024, and another one in summer 2025 through the Poetry Society of New York. I went to the Tin House Summer Workshop in July 2024 for Creative Nonfiction, but I am currently not working on that project because I am trying to write a novel. That’s just some lightly depraved behavior I’ve been engaging in recently. I have received support from Rutgers University, The University of Pennyslvania, the Ora Lerman Trust, and Soroptimist International to go to various writing conferences and workshops and things like that. I also have been awarded residencies at Soaring Gardens (May 2022) and Art Farm in Nebraska (summers 2022, 2023, 2024, 2025…& I will probably just keep going back forever because in addition to writing poems, I weld and plasma cut while in residence, which are two things I’m pretty good at, though you might be surprised to learn that information).
I wrote the poetry chapbooks Boring Eclipse (forthcoming: The Year, 2026), Heehee (forthcoming: Ursus Americanus, TBD), and DUH (Bullshit Lit, 2022), and my full-length poetry manuscript Professions was long-listed for the International Metatron Poetry Prize, and a Semi-Finalist for the 2024 Black Lawrence Press Hudson Prize. My work has been named a Finalist for the 2024 Kenyon Review Developmental Editing Fellowship, the inaugural 2023 Nine Syllables Press Chapbook Contest, the McSweeney’s Quarterly Concern 2023 Stephen Dixon Award for Short Fiction, AWP’s 2022 Kurt Brown Prize in Creative Nonfiction, and International Literary Seminar’s 2022 and 2023 Fiction Contests. Also, it was twice named a Semi-Finalist for the Giancarlo DiTrapano Residency, and once for the Poetry Center San José’s 2022 Red Wheelbarrow Poetry Prize, and Tilted House’s inaugural Chapbook Prize. I have been nominated for some Pushcart Prizes and Best of the Net Anthologies too, though I have not yet received either award. The intramural softball team I coached in college won the B League championships in 2018. We were called Blood, Bath, & Beyond : ).
I am also a fiction editor at Barrelhouse Magazine, which I do not get paid to do, but I do get paid to plan events and write communications for the Impact, Value, & Sustainable Business Initiative (Wharton Impact) at the Wharton School of Business at the University of Pennsylvania. You might think I’m joking about that but I am serious. If someone wanted to pay me to just make or teach art full time that would be cool but I have learned a lot about business working for the business school so that’s cool too. In fact, I have a poetry show about business which is called Business vs. Poetry and some clips from that are available on my Instagram. This is a show where I explain how we can use business tools to improve poetry. I do this so you don’t have to—but you can buy in at any time!
Before I did my MFA I lived in the Bay Area and my job title was Associate Director of Communications and Digital Media for City Arts & Lectures, which is basically where the biggest writers and cultural figures go on book tour. They sit on a stage and engage in one hour of live conversation, followed by a Q&A. Before that, we would take them out to dinner, so I have had dinner with pretty much anyone really famous who went on book tour between 2018 and early March 2020. One very famous writer cried on my shoulder after they got food poisoning, but I won’t say anything else about that. I did all kinds of communications and digital media things there, like I wrote a weekly(ish) newsletter, produced an audio miniseries called Crosstalk for podcast & radio broadcast (this wasn’t about jesus or anything, it’s a reference to model UN when they would bang the gavel and say “no crosstalk!” Anyway they aired this on KQED), produced events (such as Femail: The Art of Sustainable Fashion and a conversation with Cheryl Dunye), maintained a growing audio archive, developed social media presences, and one time actually posted an almost viral Twitter thread, which went almost viral because the journalist Anand Giridharadas reposted my image of his book paired with Karli Kloss wearing a dress that was visually evocative of the coin on the cover of his book Winners Take All. Samin Nosrat called me a genius 🙂.
Before that, I contributed to fields magazine, and produced and edited public radio broadcasts and podcast episodes for the San Francisco-based radio producers, The Kitchen Sisters. I really thought I was going to work in radio but it turned out I was a poet, I just didn’t realize that yet.
I also used to make a lot of clothes and I have made three quilts. I should post the other two on my website but I keep forgetting to do that. You can find them on my Instagram page. Quilting is sort of like poetry to me; it’s a form and you can interpret it how you want. I do it in a sort of intuitive and tranquil way but it’s also pretty technical. That’s maybe true of my poetry…though it’s really not my job to interpret my own work.
As I said earlier, I have an MFA in Creative Writing from Rutgers University-Camden (conferred May 2023), and you might also like to know I have a BA from Wesleyan University, where I graduated with Honors in English and a Film Minor in 2018. I am on Letterboxed @ julietfilmminor in case you were wondering about that.
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Juliet Gelfman-Randazzo 