Hi! I’m Jaclyn.
As a Hamilton-based literary artist, I’m obsessed with how stories work at every scale — from syllable to cosmic pattern, from notebook scribble to work of art.
In a world that's riddled with perfectionism and obsessed with sameness, I believe the most electric writing happens when we trust in our dreams, our bodies, and our subconscious minds.
I write poetry, picture books, and stories. And in my non-writing time, I help other literary artists develop their craft and cultivate extraordinary creative lives.
My Books ❁
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Weird Babies
Short stories. The Porcupine’s Quill, forthcoming in Fall 2026
WEIRD BABIES is a short story collection about weird babies: a miraculous set of reincarnated quadruplets, babies born from the bellies of trout, babies who are destined to molt like tarantulas, babies who hatch from piles of warm clothes. It's also about the weird baby living in each of us -- the tenderest part of ourselves that longs, at whatever the cost, to be loved.
Stories within the collection have been nominated for the Best of the Net Award (2025), Best American Science Fiction and Fantasy (2023), and Best American Short Stories (2023). One story won the RBC/PEN Canada New Voices Award (2018), one was shortlisted for the Room Magazine Fiction Contest (2024), one was a finalist for the CRAFT Short Fiction Prize (2023), and one was a finalist for the CRAFT Novelette Print Prize (2024). Stories within this collection have appeared in The Ex-Puritan, Minola Review, the Temz Review, and CRAFT.
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Danger Flower
Poetry. Palimpsest Press/ Anstruther Books, 2021
A baby transforms into a reverse mermaid in a baptism gone wrong. After being stepped on, a snail exacts revenge. In Danger Flower, Jaclyn Desforges leads enlightened witnesses through a wild garden where archetypal tales are treated with tongue-in-cheek irreverence. Amidst nesting dolls and opossums, poison oak and Tamagotchis, the poet navigates gender roles, sexual indiscretions, episodic depression, and mothering, forming essential survival strategies for a changing world. Danger Flower is a necessary debut.
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Why Are You So Quiet?
Picture book. Annick Press, 2020
Annick Press“Why are you so quiet?” Her teacher implores it, her classmates shout it, even her mom wonders it. Everyone, it seems, is concerned for Myra Louise. So, in search of an answer to the tiresome question nobody will stop asking, she invents a listening machine. If the raindrops, or the crickets, or the dryers at the laundromat can tell her why they’re so quiet, maybe Myra Louise can finally make everybody understand. But the more she listens, the less interested she becomes in finding any answer at all. Because Myra Louise comes to realize that all she really needs is someone else to listen alongside her. With gorgeous illustrations from Risa Hugo, Jaclyn Desforges’s first picture book champions introversion and the value of being a listener, a thinker, and an observer in our increasingly loud world.
(Fancy Pants Alert)
My Literary Bio✴︎
Jaclyn Desforges is the queer and neurodivergent author of Danger Flower (winner of the 2022 Hamilton Literary Award for Poetry) and a picture book, Why Are You So Quiet? (shortlisted for the Chocolate Lily Award). Her poetry collection will travel to the moon in 2025 as part of the New York Times-featured Lunar Codex Project.
With generous support from the Canada Council for the Arts, she recently completed her short story collection Weird Babies (forthcoming from Porcupine's Quill Press, 2026) and is currently writing her first novel, Eyelash Person. A Bread Loaf alumna and RBC/PEN Canada New Voices Award winner, her writing has appeared in CRAFT Literary, The Fiddlehead, Room Magazine, and others across North America. She teaches poetry at Wilfrid Laurier University and lives in Hamilton, Ontario. ❃
For my full bio, hi-res headshots, and media info ↓
Read my work ❃
Awards & Accolades
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For the creation of a novel, Eyelash Person
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For a short story, Grief
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Item description
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❁Kind words about my writing
“ Jaclyn Desforges writes with the wolves of fairy tales and the yellowjackets of domestic life; Danger Flower is a glittering, lush, spectral wilderness of a book.”
- Shannon Bramer, author of Precious Energy
“Desforges’ story is an artful accomplishment; the author braids Aristotle, botany, and fairy tales into a story of remarkable subtlety. The ambitious and sophisticated structure of the work results in moments of brilliant and unusual interplay between its different parts.”
— Emily Keeler, David Bezmozgis, and Elizabeth Ruth, RBC/PEN Canada New Voices Award jurors
“At the heart of it all—thundering through the story toward its glistening, uncanny conclusion—is love.Here, we find a piece that unites those essential virtues of sentence-level innovation and overall thematic coherence to create a short story that is stunning in its degree of complexity and elegance.”
— CRAFT Literary
“Flora, and fauna, and sex. It’s a privilege to be an early reader of Danger Flower. A truly transformative debut.”
- Molly Cross-Blanchard, author of Exhibitionist
“Juxtaposing layers of remembrances and Haiku-like truths, Homecoming is a masterful touchstone of inhabitable depth. Rueful wit trades in melancholia as it plays carefully with the past, cradling all the fragile smallness that we’re born from.”
— Ed Clayton, Short Works Prize juror
“From the captivating opening sentence to the stunning finale, The Gall is a dreamlike study of aching motherhood and loss and almost mythological stories of tragic misunderstanding. The imagery is particularly fresh and powerful and visceral: the reader cannot help but be moved.”
— Brent van Staalduinen, Short Works Prize juror