In Velvet: New and Selected Poems (Paperback or Softback)

Jeanne Bryner asks of us, "Where are the great studies on buried miners/burned women, displaced steel workers/the lost towns gutted like deer/people left to choose between the river and the sky?" In this new collection of poetry, Bryner celebrates and mourns those unstudied and unsung. With stunning specificity, she catalogs their courage: the nurse who, from a blue paper cup, baptizes a dying husband; the firefighter kneeling beside the gurney of a toddler; a schoolteacher carrying a disabled child "down/every/single/step/in those ivory pumps." Bryner's tender rendering of the unsung reminds us of our fleeting connection between the river and sky. -Geraldine Gorman,co-editor with Paula Sergi for A Call to Nursing,

Jeanne Bryner's family was part of Appalachia's outmigration from Wetzel County, West Virginia and Greene County, Pennsylvania. Following work, her parents moved to Ohio where her father was hired in a mill. Migration and the fracture of family is never easy. "Home is the landscape familiar to one's heart and speech patterns gathering on evening's porch."

Due to family illness, she has been a caregiver her entire life. Another layer of migration is the absence of extended family. "The bodies around you are the ones you lean against; they are your life vest, even if they are babies."

She grew up in Newton Falls, Ohio. A retired board certified emergency room nurse, she's a graduate of Trumbull Memorial Hospital's School of Nursing and Kent State University's Honors College. She has several books in print and her work has been adapted for the stage nationally and also the 2005 Fringe Festival in Edinburgh, Scotland. She has received awards for community service, nursing, and writing fellowships from Bucknell University, the Ohio Arts Council (1997, 2007) and Vermont Studio Center. With Cortney Davis, she co-edited Learning to Heal: Reflections on Nursing School in Poetry and Prose, Kent State University Press, 2018 which received the Tillie Olsen Award for creative writing from the Working Class Studies Association and 2019 American Journal of Nursing Book of the Year Award for creative writing. In 2012 her book, Smoke: Poems, Bottom Dog Press, received an AJN Book of the Year award for creative writing. Her book, No Matter How Many Windows, Wind Publications, received the 2011 WCSA Tillie Olsen Award for creative writing. In 2022 with the support of Sigma's International Nurse Honor Society chapter, Delta Xi, she established a Nurse Honor Guard unit in her community.

Jeanne lives near a dairy farm with her husband David, a veteran and industrial worker. Her son works in a machine shop and her daughter is a nurse.