*About Jacquelyn Markham
About the Jacquelyn Markham
Peering Into The Iris: An Ancestral Journey, draws from a large body of work that reflects Jacquelyn Markham’s rich and varied life of creative expression: poetry, prose, visual art, music, gardening, and spirituality. In selecting the pieces for this collection, she has focused on remembering and reclaiming—self, identity, heritage, nature— recurrent themes in her work for over three decades. This collection weaves a golden thread from herself to her mother, to Grandmother Klajda, to Great Grandmother Krolczyk, and to imagined Polish ancestors, her matrilineal heritage.
Born of Polish, English, and French Canadian ancestry in a small Michigan town that borders both a river and the shore of the great Lake Michigan, she was one of nine children. She attended a one room school in rural Michigan from kindergarten to 6th grade until her father’s job transfer uprooted her family in the early sixties, and she migrated to the boom town of Huntsville, Alabama with her parents and eight siblings. A first generation college graduate, she received her PhD and Masters in Creative Writing from Florida State University and Bachelor of Arts at the University of Alabama in Huntsville. Active in the grassroots women’s movement in the Seventies and Eighties, Markham was a pioneer in Women’s Studies, developing and teaching courses on university campuses, by correspondence, and eventually online.
Markham has mentored countless writers of all ages in diverse academic and community settings. She has taught at The University of Georgia, Georgia Southern University, Midway College, the University of South Carolina Beaufort and currently for South University. A recipient of grants and awards for literary merit, Markham’s poetry has been published in national journals for more than two decades, including Sing Heavenly Muse!, Bitterroot International Poetry Journal, South Florida Poetry Review, and Lullwater Review. In 1991, she was one of five writers nationwide awarded a residency at Wolf Pen Writers’ Colony in Prospect, Kentucky to complete a full-length choreopoem, Story Circle. In March, 2010, she presented “Writing A Personal Mythology: Mythopoeia as a Political Act” at the Southeastern Women’s Studies Association at the University of South Carolina in Columbia.
Image: Jacquelyn Markham, winter beach
photograph by Mary Jett
& Culture Connections
creating community with people, ideas, and the arts
I started Culture Connections to continue my life’s dedication to cultural enrichment, as an independent consultant. Culture Connections gives me creative freedom to work in the arts, cultural preservation, and education in its many forms.
Richard Florida, in The Rise of the Creative Class, identified the growing role of creativity in the economy. Through Culture Connections, I respond to needs that have emerged from that shift toward a “creative class” in American life. I provide services to arts and cultural organizations, social entrepreneurs, individual artists, and others who want to solve problems creatively while enriching themselves and their communities.
Jacquelyn Markham, Ph.D.
An independent educational and cultural consultant, Dr, Jacquelyn Markham provides services to arts and cultural organizations who seek to enrich their communities. She also teaches art, writing, and literature to diverse groups in university and community settings.
Formerly on the Consultant Roster for the Kentucky & South Carolina Peer Advisory Networks, she trained with Craig Dreeszen, Director Emeritus of the Arts Extension Service at the University of Massachusetts. After more than a decade of university teaching in Florida and Georgia, infusing courses and campus with the arts as chair of Lecture and Humanities Committees, Jacquelyn focused her work in the community as Founding Director of Spiral Dynamics Resource and Cultural Exchange, an active member organization to promote arts, diversity, and gender equity through community programs.
Recipient of a 2008 Arts Council of Beaufort County Individual Artist Grant, three Georgia Council for the Arts grants for Literary Merit, and a Kentucky Foundation for Women Award, she has exhibited her visual art and conducted writing workshops and readings throughout the Southeast.