Portrait of Jenni B. Baker
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Jenni B. Baker

Awards Received

Individual Artist

2017

About the Artist

Jenni B. Baker is an experimental poet based in Bethesda, MD. Her poetry, generated through conceptual, constrained and other “found” techniques, has appeared in publications such as The Journal, Hayden’s Ferry Review, DIAGRAM, Washington Square, Lunch Ticket, Whiskey Island, BOAAT and Quarterly West, among others. Her chapbook, Comings/Goings, a collection of poems generated by applying Oulipian constrained writing techniques to text from The Washington Post, debuted in 2015. In her current, multi-year project, Erasing Infinite (http://www.erasinginfinite.com), Baker creates poetry via erasure from David Foster Wallace’s Infinite Jest, one page at a time. The project has been profiled in publications such as The Huffington Post, BuzzFeed, The Michigan Quarterly Review and Creative Thresholds. “Year of Glad,” a classical song cycle by composer Patrick Greene featuring lyrics from the Erasing Infinite project, premiered in Chicago in April 2016. She is a co-founder and Projects Director at Container (http://acontainer.co), a press publishing artist books, text objects and words in other forms. She is the founder and former editor-in-chief of The Found Poetry Review (2011-2017), a literary journal dedicated to publishing found, erased and other remixed texts.

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Featured Work

Photos

This piece, part of a larger series entitled "This American Death," contain language sourced from the complete "This American Life" transcripts. To create each piece, I scraped the database of TAL transcripts from their website, then used a concordance tool to locate phrases beginning with certain terms ("this guy," "this kid," "this woman" and "this person"). The results are then plotted on a cemetery map originally produced by the Works Progress Administration.
We don’t know what we don’t know about the 2016 United States presidential election, but we know that we don’t know. How did he pull it off? Who interfered? And who has the proof? The democracy that we believed to be transparent and accessible is in reality a locked box. We read into media reports, investigations and dossiers to get clarity on these dark deeds, negotiating fragments that serve to both illuminate and obscure the larger story inside.
Boy Book is a series of erasures from the seventh edition of the Boy Scout Handbook, published in 1967.