Jennifer Lentfer

Jennifer Lentfer is a collagist and poet whose work is focused on rebuilding culture, as well as honoring lineage and community. She creates story-filled, quilt-like collages from a box of found images collected from magazines and junk mail that she has curated for the last fifteen years, as well as photographs, diaries, and administrative documents of her ancestors.

Lentfer’s analog collages wrestle with, and at the same time, preserve her ancestors’ humanity, while constructing the world she wants to see emerge from reckoning with settler colonialism. Her work has appeared in Kolaj Magazine and Photo Trouvée Magazine, and in juried exhibitions in Burbank, California, New Orleans, Louisiana, Washington, D.C., and Sanquhar, Scotland.

She was proud to be part of the inaugural Collage Nebraska exhibition at the Hot Shops in May 2024, and many other local shows in Omaha. Jennifer’s poems have been published in The Guardian UK, Split this Rock, Lucky Jefferson, Yemassee Journal, GRIFFEL, and on her blog, how-matters.org. An essay interrogating narratives of “America, the great” within her own German settler ancestry, entitled “A story of us,” appeared in EcoTheo Review. One of her poems became lyrics in a music composition commissioned for the official opening ceremony of the Peace Bridge in Derry~Londonderry, Ireland in 2011, but she didn’t feel like a poet until the following year when her cousins asked her to write a piece about their grandpa’s hands to be read at his funeral.