Jean Prokott’s poetry collection The Second Longest Day of the Year won the Howling Bird Press Book Prize and was published with Howling Bird Press in November 2021. In April 2023, she was selected as Poet Laureate for Rochester, Minnesota. She is the author of the chapbook The Birthday Effect (Black Sunflowers 2021), is a recipient of the AWP Intro Journals Award, and of the John Calvin Rezmerski Memorial Grand Prize with the League of Minnesota Poets. She has poetry and nonfiction published in Verse Daily, Rattle, Arts & Letters, Midwestern Gothic, Quarterly West, Great Lakes Review, RHINO, Red Wheelbarrow, and Sierra Nevada Review, among other journals.  

She has been teaching at the high school, college, and graduate levels for over fifteen years and has designed original curriculum for over ten courses, including Philosophy, Creative Writing, Literature and History of Film, American Literature, AP Language & Composition, and Implementation of Instruction and Curriculum Planning. She is a recipient of two scholarships from the National Endowment for the Humanities: to study the Philosophers of Education at Boston University and to study John Steinbeck at Stanford & San Jose State University.

She is a graduate of Minnesota State University Mankato’s MFA program, holds a Master of Science in Education from Winona State University, and lives in Rochester, Minnesota with her husband and their two dogs.