Hello, and welcome!
I’m Jody Collins, an author, poet, and teacher. My days are centered on lifelong learning and teaching in informal settings at church and around my kitchen table.
With 20+ years’ experience in elementary classrooms and my own journey into writing, publishing, and teaching poetry, I’m passionate about inviting others to make friends with poetry.
MY STORY
The seeds for my love of poetry were planted in 1973
when I discovered the words ‘poetry’ and ‘Christian’ could actually go together. I began by reading the work of prolific poet & publisher Luci Shaw and dove into years of writing Very Bad Poems. I was always writing.
When I went back to school as a mom at the age of 36 I pursued an educational program and graduated at the age of 40 with a K-8 Teaching degree. From there, I spent over 20 years wrangling early learners from Kindergarten through 6th grade and loved it. I also taught middle school for two years and lived to tell about it. (Give me all the six-year-olds.)
In 2012, my writing bent resurfaced and I started a blog, sharing about the intersection of faith and life. My online readership began to grow as I connected with other Christians and poetry lovers through ‘bloghops’ and commenting on other people’s work.
In 2017, I self-published my first book, Living the Season Well: Reclaiming Christmas, to help families deal with the pressures of the Christmas season.
In 2018, after feeling a nudge to explore poetry in my personal writing, I shared my first published poem with none other than Luci Shaw (!) at a Christian writing festival. Her response—“It’s only the beginning”—gave me the courage to pursue poetry wholeheartedly.
Since that time, I’ve published two books of poetry–Hearts on Pilgrimage-Poems & Prayers (2021) and Mining the Bright Birds-Poems of Longing for Home (2023).
Now, as the mom of two grown children and Nana to six kids, aged 6 to 23, I enjoy not only reading poetry to them but helping them make friends with poetry, too.
Three things I love about poetry:
1. Reading poetry offers me words to describe my own thoughts and feelings and the best poems cause me to look up to God. Plus—new vocabulary! I love it when a poem sends me to my dictionary.
2. Writing poetry has made me more attentive to the world around me, noticing the little things (and big) like sunsets or the way the light lands on the trees or the feeling I have listening to birdsong.
3. Teaching poetry offers the joy of seeing people attempt to read or write poetry for the first time. The ‘aha’ on their faces as they discover ways to think poetically about the world around them is like watching them find an undiscovered country that’s been there all along.
Luci Shaw is on my left in the sage green blazer. 2018, Grand Rapids, Mich.
