Chelsea Werner-Jatzke

Chelsea Werner-Jatzke is a writer exploring the liminal spaces of the literary arts. She is the author of the chapbooks Adventures in Property Management (Sibling Rivalry, 2017), Borough Body (Cold Cube Press, 2017), and Thunder Lizard (H_NGM_N, 2016). Her interest in how words are experienced has led to solo work and collaborations with artists across media to create gallery installations, music performances, broadsides, karaoke, and video poetry. She is co-founder and co-director of Cadence: Video Poetry Festival, the only video poetry festival in the Pacific Northwest. She also founded and was director of Till, a literary organization. 

She has worked as outreach coordinator for Conium Review and was previously managing fiction editor at Pacifica Literary Review. She has received support from Jack Straw Cultural Center as a writing fellow, from Artist Trust as an EDGE participant, and from the Cornish College Arts Incubator. She has been a writer in residence at Vermont Studio Center and Ragdale Foundation. Werner-Jatzke has taught creative writing through Seattle Central Community College and served on the board of Lit Crawl Seattle. She received her MFA from Goddard College, where she was editor-in-chief of Pitkin Review and founded Lit.mustest, a now-defunct reading series. She moonlights as a communications professional.

Artist Website

Released in 12 monthly installments, this suite of short films troubles the boundaries between and within cinematic and literary forms. Helmed by contemplative filmmaker and autotheorist M Freeman, the series is curated by them along with Rana San and Chelsea Werner-Jatzke. In Camera Lucida, Roland Barthes writes “The incapacity to name is a good symptom of disturbance.” Each monthly release includes one to three short films and an accompanying critical essay that observes, wonders, speculates and imagines the implications of work that defies easy categorization and resists our impulse to name. This project challenges the page as the domain of literary art and invests fully in the conviction that necessary alternatives to received ideas about authorship, publishing and genre arise from artists who live and work outside the stockade of dominant culture: queer, Black and Indigenous womxn, other womxn of Color and people with disabilities.