B. Fulton Jennes was raised in one of "the boondock towns east of Albany, [where] people stayed put all their lives" in a time when you could still hear and feel the bone-rattling booms created when jets broke the sound barrier overhead-a sometimes-destructive disturbance outlawed by the FAA in 1973. After college, she spent decades writing corporate ads and brochures, became a middle-school English teacher in her late 40s, and then returned to her original love-poetry-in retirement. Her poems have appeared widely in literary journals and anthologies. Her collection Blinded Birds received the 2022 International Book Award for a poetry chapbook. She is also the author of another chapbook: FLOWN-an elegy-in-verse to her late sister. Jennes is poet laureate emerita of Ridgefield, CT, where she directs the Poetry in the Garden festival each summer and hosts "Poems from Connecticut's Four Corners," a monthly online reading series.