Jean Prokott is the poet laureate of Rochester, Minnesota and a 2024 Academy of American Poets Laureate Fellow. She is the author of the poetry collection The Second Longest Day of the Year, which won the Howling Bird Press Book Prize and was published with Howling Bird Press in November 2021, and of the chapbook The Birthday Effect (Black Sunflowers 2021). She is a recipient of the AWP Intro Journals Award and the John Calvin Rezmerski Memorial Grand Prize with the League of Minnesota Poets, and she has poetry and nonfiction published in Verse Daily, Rattle, Arts & Letters, Great Lakes Review, RHINO, Red Wheelbarrow, and Sierra Nevada Review, among other journals.  She has received 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.

Prokott has taught 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 graduate of Minnesota State University Mankato’s MFA program and holds a Master of Science in Education from Winona State University. She teaches high school English and lives in Rochester, Minnesota with her husband and their two dogs.