Reiter's Block

Welcome to Reiter's Block

Jendi Reiter is a poet, novelist, and collage artist whose work explores themes of belonging and becoming, magic, queerness, and family violence.

Their writing has won multiple awards including two Massachusetts Cultural Council Artists’ Grants for Poetry, the New Letters Prize for Fiction, the Rainbow Award for Best Gay Contemporary Fiction, the Oscar Wilde Award from Gival Press, and more. They are the editor of the writing resource site WinningWriters.com.

A Level 2 Graduate of the Temple of Witchcraft Mystery School, Jendi lives in Western Massachusetts with their family, their cat, and 200 Barbie dolls.

Explore their work.

Latest Books

Origin Story
Saddle Road Press
Finalist for the Foreword INDIES and the Big Moose Prize

Jendi Reiter’s second novel is a queer coming-of-age story about healing through art. Peter Edelman, a progressive Jewish activist, and his partner, fashion photographer Julian Selkirk, must navigate Peter’s first long-term relationship against the backdrop of late-1990s New York City sexual politics. While working in a transitional home for at-risk youth, Peter collaborates with a teenage bi-gendered artist on a gay superhero comic with themes echoing his own long-repressed traumatic memories. The innovative storytelling structure reflects the fragmented nature of repressed memory.

Praise for Jendi's Work

“It’s rare to discover within a gay love story an equally-powerful undercurrent of political and spiritual examination. Too many gay novels focus on evolving sexuality or love and skim over underlying religious values systems; but one of the special attributes of Two Natures isn’t just its focus on duality, but its intense revelations about what it means to be both Christian and gay.”

Diane Donovan, Midwest Book Review

"Dense with figure and dense with thought, full of fun and full of anguish, superbly conscious of every rule they break, sometimes giving us comfort and sometimes 'another live coal in your mouth,' the poems in Made Man work and play and travel in many directions, speak through many and varied masks. Then they come back together to point to a confident future, a nonbinary embodiment."

Stephanie Burt, Editor of Super Gay Poems

"Reiter’s investment in Peter and Julian is so deep we cannot help falling in love with them. Peter: yoga coach, gym trainer, and mentor to a homeless teen; Julian: rising star fashion photographer. We are moved by their emotional and physical intimacy. Their erotic sex is scribed with joyful abandon and acrobatic grace. Rough, tender, holy, immediate, and abundant...Origin Story is both a map and a manual. By the skill of his craft and the beauty of his art, we find our own path."

Richard Cambridge, Solstice Lit Mag

"Jendi Reiter's Introvert Pervert is politically personal and personally political, bursting with post-confessional wit and tenderness...A woman becomes a man, a child becomes a parent with a delightfully neo-surrealist intolerance for intolerance, school shootings, banned books, and the tortured children of Palestine. Is to love all creatures perverse? Then I'm a pervert too!"

Denise Duhamel

Jendi's Art

Inspired by queer zine culture, Jendi’s collage art juxtaposes vintage catalogs, erotic photos, fashion and lifestyle magazines, didactic texts of yesteryear, and other paper ephemera to comment on political repression and envision a freer world through the energetic magic of color.

Contact jendi@winningwriters.com to order prints or license art for book covers.

Events with Jendi

Come to the launch of Jendi’s new poetry collection, Introvert Pervert, at the AWP Conference in Baltimore, MD from March 4-7!