Jamie Wendt is the author of the poetry collection Laughing in Yiddish (Broadstone Books, 2025), which was a finalist for the 2022 Philip Levine Prize in Poetry. Her first book, Fruit of the Earth (Main Street Rag, 2018), won the 2019 National Federation of Press Women Book Award in Poetry. Her poems and essays have been published and are forthcoming in various literary journals and anthologies, including Feminine Rising, Catamaran, Lilith, Jet Fuel Review, the Forward, Clockhouse, Consequence, and others. She contributes book reviews to the Jewish Book Council. She won third prize in the 2024 Reuben Rose Poetry Competition and won second prize for the 2024 Holloway Free Verse Award through the Illinois State Poetry Society. Wendt holds an MFA in Creative Writing from the University of Nebraska Omaha. She lives in Chicago with her husband and two kids. Follow her online at https://jamie-wendt.com/ or on Instagram @jamiewendtpoet.

Praise for Laughing in Yiddish

"In these deeply felt and painstakingly crafted poems, a woman grapples with centuries of Jewish persecution and diaspora. A visitation of “[w]inged angels – my ancestors” opens the book, and it closes with a vow to keep telling the stories of “a wound bigger than the humid sky.” The poems span geography and time, from Wendt’s ancestral roots in Russia to her family’s more recent life in Chicago, passing through pogroms and flight to “poverty and perseverance.” Here you will find an insistence on history and an unflinching gaze on its horrors, held in equipoise with the blessings of family, faith, and tradition. Along the way you’ll hear stories told by Wendt’s grandfather and others, featuring everyday women and men struggling to survive, and more than a few golems. Throughout these poems, Yiddish words and phrases leaven writing that engages with formal tradition—pantoum, ghazal, triolet, ekphrasis—in order to “read and wrestle the past.” Laughing in Yiddish is a comfort and a tikkun olam, offering a way to endure and remember, remember and endure."

—Rebecca Foust, author of ONLY and Marin County Poet Laureate emerita

"Jerusalem, Ancient Egypt, Lithuania, Chicago. Wendt’s striking poems conflate Jewish history, ancestral anecdotes, and contemporary experience. Laden with surprising and pleasurable leaps, Laughing in Yiddish movingly reminds us that the past haunts and enriches the present while the present preserves and sweetens the past. This is a luminous book!"

—Yehoshua November, author of The Concealment of Endless Light

"Drawing on the history of the Jewish people, stories passed down from family to family, the work of Jewish artists (painters, photographers) and personal experience, Jamie Wendt has written a riveting and moving collection of poems. In persona, personal, and ekphrastic poems, Wendt creates a rich portrait of the Jewish people, both in their homelands of eastern Europe and in their displacement to the West, most specifically the city of Chicago. These beautifully crafted poems move from lyric to narrative to Whitmanesque revelations of the people—their work, their rearing of children, the rituals of their faith that hold their communities together, the horrors of war and persecution, their resilience. Wendt manages to deftly reveal the details of these lives and deaths, while at the same time opening our minds and hearts to the big picture. A rare and beautiful book, and just maybe, in these perilous times of rising antisemitism and autocracy, a necessary one."

—Jim Peterson, author of The Horse Who Bears Me Away & Towheaded Stone Thrower