Jan Clausen

Jan Clausen was born in North Bend, Oregon, in 1950. Her parents were recent transplants from their native Minnesota. She and two younger sisters spent their early years in Humboldt County, California. In 1960, the family moved to the Puget Sound area. Her family’s passion for the mountains and forests of the Pacific Northwest (and the cognitive dissonance of her father’s job in the timber industry) affected her deeply. So did the nuclear terror of the time, beginning with kindergarten air raid drills and memorably including the Cuban Missile Crisis of 1962.

Clausen attended Reed College in Portland, Oregon, majoring in philosophy and dropping out after her junior year. She wrote poetry and began to publish in little magazines. In 1973, she moved to New York City, and soon came out into a vibrant lesbian feminist community, finding an audience for her writing via its poetry readings and growing small press movement. She cooperatively published her first book, the poetry collection after touch, in 1975. In the following year, together with Elly Bulkin, Irena Klepfisz, and Rima Shore, she founded Conditions, “a magazine of women’s writing with an emphasis on writing by lesbians,” which she co-edited until 1980.

Over the years, Clausen’s writing has spanned numerous genres. In the 1980’s, she focused heavily on fiction, publishing a story collection and two novels with the Crossing Press (U.S.) and The Women’s Press Ltd. (U.K.). Her memoir Apples and Oranges: My Journey through Sexual Identity was issued by Houghton Mifflin in 1999. Two new poetry collections, From a Glass House (IKON) and If You Like Difficulty (Harbor Mountain Press) appeared in 2007. The recipient of writing fellowships from the National Endowment for the Arts and the New York Foundation for the Arts, Clausen has published her creative work in Bloom, Fence, Gay and Lesbian Poetry in Our Time, Hanging Loose, The Kenyon Review, North American Review, Ploughshares, and many other periodicals and anthologies. Her essays, book reviews, and literary journalism appear in Boston Review, Ms., The Nation, Poets and Writers, and The Women’s Review of Books.

Since 1989, Clausen has taught creative writing at Eugene Lang College, Manhattan, where she is active in her faculty labor union, ACT-UAW. She also teaches in the Goddard College MFA Writing Program. Her thesis for her own M.A. in gender studies and feminist theory (New School for Social Research) was on “North American Feminists and the Sandinista Revolution.”

Excerpts from Clausen’s recently completed novel, The Company of Cannibals, may be found here.