Rochelle Hurt

Jocelyn, Jodie, Jennifer, Jacqui, Joelle. Ignoring the optimistic advice of elders, these five working-class teens in the Rust Belt band together in their embrace of bad behavior and poor taste as they navigate sexuality and identity with loud-mouthed joy and clear-eyed cynicism. Winner of the 2021 Blue Light Books Prize, Rochelle Hurt's The J Girls: A Reality Show is a tribute to the grit and glitter of millennial girlhood and a testament to its dangers and traumas. Hurt's creative, genre-bending mix of poetry, fiction, and screenplay brings the girls to life with campy performances of monologues, soap opera clips, mock interviews, talk shows, commercials, and even burlesque. Vulgar, rhapsodic language serves as costume and shield, allowing the J Girls to script their own images and project glowing, outsized versions of themselves into the safe space of the TV screen. Playful and poignant, The J Girls is a flashy ode to performance and a nostalgic elegy for adolescent friendships.

"In Hurt's breathtaking mixed work of prose poetry and verse, a history of place is caked in a 'deep layer of red dust.' The Rust Belt's rattling structures and sutured-up asphalt roads are palpable here in every musical sentence."--Oliver de la Paz "In Hurt's sparkling debut, the tinny, melancholic, gorgeous stir of Baudelaire's heartbroken metropolis is heard again, but this time its flesh and spirit are rusted. Hurt brings the prose poem back to life."--Sabrina Orah Mark Rochelle Hurt was forged from iron ore in the steel mills of Youngstown, Ohio. Currently, she lives in Cincinnati, Ohio, where she is pursuing a PhD.