Born Jan. 20, 1959
Woodland Hills, California
Died Jan. 2, 2024
Northampton, Massachusetts
Details of services
Cremation arrangements were handled by the Williamsburg Funeral Home.
Jacqueline met her death after a courageous battle with cancer. She is predeceased by her mother, Olga Pakidoff Gens Shreiner, and father, Alexander Pierre Gens. She is survived by brothers Mike, in Boston, and Will, in Great Neck, NY; nieces Dr. Alexandra Gens (Atlanta, GA), Athena Maitri Gens, and Lydia Karunya Gens (New York); nephew Kyle Devin Gens, Esq. (Brooklyn NY); and myriad friendships she developed over an adventurous and creative life.
As a teen, Jacqueline moved with her family to New York City and later to Bernardston in western Massachusetts. She graduated from Pioneer Valley Regional High School in 1968, working full time at Mohawk Plastics while still a student. A brief marriage to artist Stephen Curtis ended in an amicable divorce. She attended Greenfield Community College and transferred to Smith College for a BA in Classics and Anthropology as an Ada Comstock Scholar, Class of ‘81. In 1983, she pursued a graduate degree in Buddhist Studies at the Naropa Institute (now Naropa University) in Boulder, CO; in 2005, an MFA in Creative Writing (Poetry) from New England College; and in 2007, an MAT in Information Technology from Marlboro College.
Beneath her calm demeanor, she worked hard, often operating behind the scenes. Courageous, witty, irreverent, keenly delighted with conversation, she threw herself into life wholeheartedly: poetry, Tibetan Buddhism, cooking, friendships. Starting in her twenties, she lived for several years at Total Loss Farm in Guilford, VT, which remained a touchstone for the rest of her life. At Naropa, she met prominent poets and worked with many of them, including Allen Ginsberg, whom she had idolized ever since seeing him on television when she was a teenager. She moved to New York to become Ginsberg’s personal assistant, office manager, and photo archivist. Ginsberg appreciated her, saying that she saved him from negative mental patterns. Jacqueline maintained a role in Ginsberg’s legacy to the end.
Among her many accomplishments, she co-founded and co-directed, with poet Chard deNiord, a poetry workshop in Patzcuaro, Mexico, in 1998-1999, and then the MFA Program in Poetry at New England College from 2001-2012. The program included some of the very best poetry faculty in the country. Jacqueline’s wisdom, keen intelligence, and business savvy were instrumental in growing it from just ten students into an international graduate program with an enrollment of fifty-two.
A poet herself, she published several chapbooks and founded the website poetrymind, a term from the poet Russell Edson that Jacqueline used to mean a creative poetic practice “synonymous with ‘First Thought, Best Thought’,’ which . . . is not about writing without revision [but] about experience firsthand—direct and pure without a lot of egotistic filters or projections.” Jacqueline’s influence as a wise woman, dear friend to myriad MFA students, and longtime student herself of the Tibetan Buddhist master of Dzogchen leaves a deep emptiness in the hearts of her friends, an emptiness that fills immediately with memories of her kindness, humor, wisdom, and love.
“The Stuff of Dreams,” a 1977 documentary about a community production of Shakespeare’s “The Tempest” performed by the Monteverdi Players at Sweet Pond in Guilford, commemorates her essential role as stage manager. She was an active member of the Buddhist community at Tsegyalgar East in Conway, MA, where she co-founded the Khandroling Paper Cooperative. She was a respected scholar of Tibetan Buddhism, published in numerous journals and online, and had two radio monthly programs on WVEW. In retirement, she continued to write poems, run poetry writing groups online and in person, cooked as a personal chef, maintained the poetrymind blog, and defended tenants’ rights at her housing community. She remained clear-headed and vividly herself until her last hours.
Donations can be made in her memory to Shang Shung Publications or to Shang Shung Institute School of Tibetan Medicine — America by sending a check to School of Tibetan Medicine, P.O. Box 479, Conway, MA 01341.
