About Jean LeBlanc

Jean LeBlanc I was born in Fitchburg, Massachusetts, a town that makes an appearance in many of my poems. In 1994 I moved to Sussex County, New Jersey, and I have been increasingly active in the vibrant local poetry scene ever since. I have been a featured reader in the Idiom Reading Series at Sussex County Community College (through what is now the Betty June Silconas Poetry Center), at the First Tuesdays sponsored by the Writers' Roundtable (held at the time at Rose’s Grist Mill Café in Andover), and at the Poetry on the Loose series in Warwick, New York. In September of 2007 I read at the Warren County Poetry Festival. My poetry has appeared in many journals, including the Journal of New Jersey Poets, the Kerf, and the Lullwater Review.

My book At Any Moment, which was published in February of 2010, is available at Amazon.com and Barnes & Noble. The Stream Singing Your Name (2009) and Where We Go (2010) were published by Modern English Tanka Press and are available from Lulu.com. Just Passing Through, published by the Paulinskill Poetry Project in 2007, is available from me (please inquire through email).

I am proud to also be the executive editor of the Paulinskill Poetry Project. The Project's goal is to publish local poetry; our philosophy is that “local voices ring truest in local ears.” After the successful publication of two chapbooks, the Paulinskill Poetry Project published Voices from Here in 2009. Voices from Here is a full-length anthology featuring the work of poets from Sussex, Morris, Somerset, Hunterdon, and Warren Counties in New Jersey; Orange County, New York; and Pike, Monroe, and Northampton Counties, Pennsylvania.

People often ask me where I get the ideas for my poems. Watching a baseball game; weeding my flower garden; walking around Newton; grading papers at my desk–inspiration can strike at any moment. Rather than keeping a journal, I try to write at least one tanka a day; these short poetic forms such as tanka and haiku train one's“inner eye” to the truth of the moment. Many of my tanka have been published in Modern English Tanka.