Casey Jarrin
writer. artist. creator. educator. DREAMER.
I believe in words and images as empathy machines — mechanisms for understanding the grotesque beautiful absurd experience of being human in the twenty-first century, communicating with each other across gulfs of time-space-P.O.V., listening and seeing, animating wild dreams. My work emerges from the textures-sounds-sensory landscapes of communities I’ve lived and breathed in, approaching joys and pains with humor and possibility. I also incorporate my background as a musician and filmmaker into my poems, prose, paintings, and photographs, attuned to where to zoom in and out, when voices-images-rhythms take center stage, what lies just out of earshot or beyond the frame.
My writing and visual art excavate visceral experience where human and natural worlds meet, mining shared prehistories-genealogies-anatomies to find meaning in constellations and seaweed, sexiness in string theory and deep sea creatures. I explore the structures of neural networks–tree branches–galaxies as architectures of becoming, reclaiming the idea of “untetheredness" from one of insult ("you're *so* untethered") to unbounded possibility. Born in New York City and inspired by a family of artists, scientists, and dreamers, I create at the crossroads of thinking and everyday alchemy. Since earning my English BA (Yale) and surviving my Literature/Film Ph.D. (Duke), I’ve lived in Dublin, Berlin, and Minneapolis-Saint Paul, and collaborated across creative and learning communities as a poet, painter, photographer, empathy educator, workshop facilitator, editor, professor.
My poems, prose, and essays have been published across the U.S., Ireland, and the U.K. in journals including Banshee, Abridged, Poetry Ireland/Trumpet, Washington Square Review, Belfield Literary Review, Channel, Banyan Review, Stony Thursday, Buzzwords, Grand Journal, Éire/Ireland, Bright Lights Film, Perisphere, and in two 2023 anthologies: Locker Room Talk: Women in Private Spaces (Spout Press), Like Flyering for the Revolution: Verve Anthology of Protest (Verve Poetry Press). I’ve received the Verve, Goldsmith, York, and Fingal Poetry Prizes; been shortlisted for the Bridport Prize, longlisted for the Fish Poetry Prize and Mslexia Pamphlet Competition; performed at the Nuyorican Poets Cafe, Verve Poetry Festival, Lime Square Poets. I’m now completing my debut poetry manuscript, The Last Moray Eel on Coney Island, and a mixed genre collection, Ice Cubes Melting in Your Hand.
My photography has been exhibited in Minneapolis and NYC, including the documentary series Jumping the Fence and This Is Not A Backdrop on trauma afterlives in architectures of contemporary global cities (LA, New Orleans, Belfast, Berlin, Minneapolis). My paintings and oil pastels use vivid colors, interwoven geometries, and human-inspired anatomies to explore connections between the micro and macro levels of experience — inside bodies, whirling through galaxies. As a facilitator of community arts projects, documentary photographer, and filmmaker, I've curated film series, exhibited in solo and group shows, collaborated on performances.
I’m trained in literature, writing, aesthetics, political theory, gender studies, and trauma studies (Yale BA, Duke Ph.D.) as well as photography and film production (Filmbase Ireland, IFP Minnesota). I’ve cultivated my writing in workshops with poets Kevin Higgins (Galway Arts Centre / Salmon Poetry), Stephen Sexton (Stinging Fly), Colette Bryce (Cúirt Festival), Grace Wilentz (Gallery Press), Rachel Wetzsteon and Wayne Koestenbaum (Yale), Cathy Bowman (Bennington College); fiction writers Caryl Phillips and Helen Schulman. I've designed and led university courses, community workshops, and public presentations from Belfast and Berlin to New Orleans, Los Angeles, NYC; taught Gen Zers and baby boomers, face-to-face and virtually; trained educators and healthcare professionals in compassionate communication; published articles on new media, social justice, trauma, cognition, empathy.
I taught literature and film at Macalester College before founding Live Mind Learning in 2015.