Jessia Adeline James is an autistic poet moored along the Salish Sea, where her long nights are spent studying by candlelight the craft of a poem, how to bring our spirits home.

Raised on the literary traditions of old New England, in the scrub-pine barrens and wild beach dunes of coastal Massachusetts, her earliest influences include Emily Dickinson, Henry David Thoreau, Nathaniel Hawthorne, Robert Frost, and Louisa May Alcott. She studied, broadly, the humanities & language arts at Salve Regina University in Newport, Rhode Island.

But it was only after becoming a mother, and happening upon Mary Oliver’s Devotions for the first time, that the door finally cracked open for her. That the sheets lifted. That she conceded to the unveiled, her deep love of poetics. To that most necessary insistence to write.

And so, the rest is history. When she isn’t reading or conjuring up a poem, you’ll probably find her in the garden laughing with the lovage, or on the ferry with her family, watching for whales.

Jessia serves as the associate editor of The Faoileánach Journal and is a member of the Conscious Writers Collective.

↬ READ HER WORK ↫