Adjunct Poets

Conversation with
Jennifer Jean

Rattle #53 features a tribute to 22 adjunct instructors, and a spirited conversation with Jennifer Jean, covering the current plight of adjuncts in academia, her work with sex trafficking survivors, and time spent as a Tarot card reader. Over 65% of U.S. college faculty now work as adjuncts, facing low wages, limited hours, and high instability. We wanted to highlight their writing, while also showing support for recent efforts at gaining better treatment by the university system. As always, the goal was to show the wide range of creative work that the featured group is producing, so while many poems address their careers, others cover a variety of subjects. All of them share their thoughts on adjuncting in the contributor notes section.

The first half of the issue features an eclectic mix of work by seventeen poets from other fields.

	Adjuncts
	Heather Altfeld	Pliny’s Traveling Apothecary …
	Ned Balbo	Rare Book and Reader
	John Bradley	What I Never Told My Draft Board
	Aubrie Cox	Five Haiku
	Anna M. Evans	The Adjunct’s Villanelle
	R.G. Evans	Almost Holy
	Howard Faerstein	Exercises for Freshman Composition
	Gail Goepfert	Cold Calling
	Steve Henn	Always Wanted a Career in Education? …
	Brionne Janae	As You Recall the End of Their Marriage
	Jennifer Jean	#CarryThatWeight
	Clint Margrave	Recap of Yesterday’s Tenure-Track …
		Meursault Gets a Job as an Adjunct …
	Jeff McRae	Performance Without Notes
	Sharon Fish Mooney	Wheat Fields with Reaper
	Peter Murphy	Mean Time
	James B. Nicola	Curtailed Sonnet
	Julie Price Pinkerton	After I Got the Email …
	Elaine Sexton	Anthem
	Rebecca Snow	Sestina for Adjuncts
	Brent Terry	21st Century Autoimmune Blues
	Meghan Tutolo	Allegheny Valley, Exit 48
	Kathleen Winter	Job Security
	Open Poetry
	Steve Abbott	Ringtone Pantoum
	Dennis Caswell	My Pet Alien
	Peter Davis	The Future as We Planned It
	John Guzlowski	Death and Poetry
	Sarah Hart	Self-Portrait as a Highway
	Lynne Knight	Water Child
	Quincy R. Lehr	War Song
	Michael Mark	The First Thanksgiving, Exactly
	Darren Morris	A Handbook for the Blind
	Jessica Plante	After Joining OkCupid …
	Hayden Saunier	The Way It Is with My Father
	Mather Schneider	Our Morning Train
	Hillery Stone	Lexicon for a Simpler Childhood
	Charles Tisdale	Air Borne
	Craig van Rooyen	Meeting the Buddha
	Wendy Videlock	Redress
	Carolyne Wright	Lady from Mountains
	Conversation
	Jennifer Jean
	Cover Art
	Allison Merriweather