Say Their Names

Jessica Ursell is a veteran JAG officer of the United States Air Force, poet, and public speaker against antisemitism and bigotry. The granddaughter of survivors of the Holocaust, Soviet gulags, and a descendant of a Taíno great-grandma, she understands in her bones what happens when intolerance, indifference, and ignorance take root in society. Jessica lives with her husband in Southern Italy where she writes about the complex interplay between trauma, power, love, loss, and madness. Her essays and poems include: At the Country Club with Superman; Standing Up for the Voiceless: My Fight with Royalty in Anne Frank’s House; What My Zayda Taught Me About Tikkun Olam; and The Scream of a Post-October 7th Jew, (The Jewish Writing Project); Sedimented Rock, and Climbing Vesuvius in Stilettos (Writing in a Woman’s Voice); Reverberations of October 7th: Musings of an American Jew on the Fourth of July, and Say Their Names (Iron Words: Israel War Stories). Jessica's poem, A Still-Life Collage of Lost Objects, appears in Down in the Dirt magazine as well as in the book, The Limits of Language, and the book Where Icarus Went. Her most recent poems are, Ricotta Cheese English, published by Mediterranean Poetry in November 2024 and I Can Walk Through Walls of Words, appearing in Academy of the Heart and Mind in December 2024. Jessica's poem, Mariupol Madonna: an elegy for the Mothers of Ukraine, will be published by Versopolis in Poetry Expo 2025. Multiple military audiences, most recently the United States Navy, Sixth Fleet, have heard Jessica speak about the importance of never being a bystander to evil which she believes is the fundamental lesson of the Holocaust.