Jenny Bornholdt

Profile
A critically acclaimed poet, Jenny Bornholdt has earned a dedicated following amongst poetry devotees in New Zealand. Her direct and seemingly effortless poetry tackles life’s big subjects – family, love, death, renewal, commitment – head on.

Selected published works
Miss New Zealand: Selected Poems, 1997; These Days, 2000; Summer, 2003, Mrs Winter's Jump, 2007; The Rocky Shore, 2008.

Publishers
Victoria University Press www.vuw.ac.nz/vup

Biography
Jenny Bornholdt was born in Lower Hutt, Wellington in 1960. She holds a Bachelor of Arts in English Literature and a Diploma in Journalism. Her collections of poetry include Summer, These Days and Miss New Zealand: Selected Poems.

With her husband, poet Gregory O’Brien, she edited a collection of New Zealand love poetry My Heart Goes Swimming (1996) and, together with Mark Williams, Bornholdt and O’Brien edited An Anthology of New Zealand Poetry in English (1997), which won the 1997 Montana New Zealand Book Award for Poetry.

Her poem Being a Poet was selected for the online collection Best New Zealand Poems 2001 and her Blue Shirts, Descending was chosen as one of the Best New Zealand Poems 2002. Bornholdt was the 2002 Meridian Energy Katherine Mansfield Fellow. In 2003, she was made an Arts Foundation of New Zealand Laureate and was the 2006 Te Mata Estate Poet Laureate.