Bittering the Wound

Jacqui Germain is a poet, journalist, and former labor and student organizer living and working in St. Louis, Missouri. Germain has received fellowships from the St. Louis Regional Arts Commission, Jack Jones Literary Arts, Callaloo Creative Writing Workshop, and the Poetry Foundation's Emerging Poets Incubator. Her poetry background also includes several years of competing in national slam poetry competitions at the collegiate and adult level. In addition to her chapbook, When the Ghosts Come Ashore, published in 2016 by Button Poetry, her poems have been published in Tinderbox Poetry Journal, The Offing, Muzzle Magazine, The Rumpus, Anomaly, and elsewhere, in addition to being anthologized in Bettering American Poetry, Volume 3, and others publications. Germain got her organizing start with Chicago's UNITE Here chapter organizing hospitality workers and later returned to St. Louis where she organized students on campus, worked on living-wage campaigns, and supported grassroots protest strategies during the 2014 Ferguson uprising. As a journalist, she has published original reporting, political commentary, and feature profiles in The Nation, The Guardian, Artsy, VICE, and more. Most recently, Germain was selected to be the 2021-2022 Economic Security Project Fellow at Teen Vogue, covering issues of class and economic inequality at the intersections of race and gender.