Jen Payne is inspired by those life moments that move us most — love and loss, joy and disappointment, milestones and turning points. Her writing serves as witness to these in the form of poetry, creative non-fiction, flash fiction and essay. When she is not exploring our connections with one another, she enjoys writing about our relationships with nature, creativity, and mindfulness, and how these offer the clearest path to finding balance in our frenetic, spinning world.

Under the imprint Three Chairs Publishing, www.3chairspublishing.com, she has published five books: LOOK UP! Musings on the Nature of Mindfulness, a collection of essays and original photography; Evidence of Flossing: What We Leave Behind, filled with poems, musings, and photographs; FLOSSING, a photo book; Waiting Out the Storm, a poetry chapbook, and the epistolary novel Water Under the Bridge: A Sort-of Love Story.

Her quarterly print project MANIFEST (zine) is a hold-in-your-hands art installation featuring Jen’s writing and mixed-media collage work, along with photography, quotes, and bits and pieces of creative whatnot.

Jen is the owner is Words by Jen, a graphic design and creative services company founded in 1993, based in Branford, Connecticut. She is a member of the Arts Council of Greater New Haven, Branford Arts and Cultural Alliance (BACA),  and Guilford Art Center.

Her work has been published by The Aurorean, Six Sentences, the Story Circle Network, and WOW! Women on Writing; in the international anthology Coffee Poems: Reflections on Life with Coffee, the Guilford Poets Guild 20th Anniversary Anthology,  in Waking Up to the Earth: Connecticut Poets in a Time of Global Climate Crisis, a poetry anthology edited by Connecticut’s Poet Laureate Margaret Gibson, and in The Perch, a publication by the Yale Program for Recovery & Community Health.

You can read more of her writing on her blog Random Acts of Writing, www.randomactsofwriting.net.