Bio

Jason Sommer has just published a memoir, titled Shmuel’s Bridge: Following the Tracks to Auschwitz with My Survivor Father, with Imagine!, a Charlesbridge adult imprint.

He is author of five poetry collections: most recently, Portulans in the University of Chicago’s Phoenix Poets Series. His two other Phoenix books are Other People’s Troubles, which won the Society of Midland Authors Award and was a finalist for the PEN/USA West Award, and The Man Who Sleeps in My Office, finalist for Kansas City Star’s William Rockhill Nelson Award.The Laughter of Adam and Eve was published by Southern Illinois University as winner of the Crab Orchard Review Competition.  Poems from his first collection, Lifting the Stone, from Forest Books, London, have been broadcast on the BBC World Service.

Sommer has been recognized with an Anna Davidson Rosenberg Award for poems about the Jewish experience and read from his work at the National Holocaust Memorial Museum’s program, “Speech and Silence: Poetry and the Holocaust.”  A former Stanford University Stegner Fellow, he has held a Whiting Foundation Writers’ Fellowship, fellowships from the Bread Loaf and Sewanee writer’s conferences as well as a residency with the YMCA’s National Writer’s Voice project.   

He has published translations of Irish language poems and, with Hongling Zhang, collaborative book-length translations of Chinese fiction: Wang in Love and Bondage: Three Novellas by Wang Xiaobo and The Bathing Women by Tie Ning, which was long-listed for the Man Asian Prize.

He lives in Saint Louis, Missouri.