An Evening to Honor Jenny Kander

JENNY KANDER is known to many as the “poetry lady,” a title she says she adores. She came to Bloomington in 1992 from South Africa to live near her daughter, Tamar Kander, a painter. When she moved here, she promised herself poetry classes—something she’d never had the time for when she worked as a grief counselor. But she did much more. She went to the community radio station WFHB with an idea for a daily dose of poetry, The Linen of Words, and for years Bloomington heard her voice or her guests’ voices twice a day. She also hosted The Poet’s Weave on WFIU from 2006-2009.

Jenny’s poetry has appeared in Flying Island, California Quarterly, Bathtub Gin, Wind, Southern Indiana Review, and Shiver. She has published two chapbooks: Taboo (Finishing Line Press, 2004) and The Altering Air (Pudding House Press, 2010).

In 2002, Kander edited The Linen Weave of Bloomington Poets, featuring 50 Bloomington poets from the town and the university, many of whom had appeared on her radio shows over the years. The book, she says, was her way of saying thank you to Bloomington for surrounding her with poetry. In 2003, she compiled and edited Celebrating Seventy, another collection of local poets, this time to mark her 70th birthday. Both books were published under Wind Magazine.

With Charles Greer, she edited two more anthologies: Say This of Horses: A Selection of Poems (University of Iowa Press, 2007) and And Know This Place: Poetry of Indiana (Indiana Historical Society Press, 2011). The latter features the work of 116 poets who live or who have lived in the state long enough to acquire a sense of the place. The book is the first collection of Indiana poetry to appear for more than a hundred years.