Jen Payne is a poet, author, and artist. She is inspired by those life moments that move us most — love and loss, joy and disappointment, milestones and turning points. When she is not exploring our connections with one another, she enjoys contemplating our relationships with nature, creativity, spirituality and our inner lives. Ultimately, she believes it is the alchemy of those things that helps us find balance in this frenetic, spinning world.

Jen writes regularly here at Random Acts of Writing, including an annual attempt to write a poem a day during National Poetry Month and NaPoWriMo.

To accommodate her creative work, she founded Three Chairs Publishing in 2014. Since then, has published five books: LOOK UP! Musings on the Nature of Mindfulness, Evidence of Flossing: What We Leave Behind, FLOSSING, Waiting Out the Storm, and her new book Water Under the Bridge: A Sort-of Love Story.

Her quarterly print project — MANIFEST (zine) — is part lit mag, part chapbook, part hold-in-your-hands art installation featuring writing, photography, and artwork, along with bits and pieces of creative whatnot.

Jen is the owner is Words by Jen, a graphic design and creative services company founded in 1993, based in Branford, Connecticut where she keeps house with a cat named Lola. She is a member of the Arts Council of Greater New Haven, Branford Arts and Cultural Alliance (BACA), and the Guilford Art Center.