Poetry at the Point Online: Jason Vasser-Elong, Linda Neal Reising & Stephan Delbos

The reading will be streamed live to this event page and to Saint Louis Poetry Center’s Facebook Live page.

Jason Vasser-Elong

Before publishing his debut collection Shrimp (2Leaf Press, 2018), Jason earned a Master of Fine Arts degree in creative writing from the University of Missouri – St. Louis, where he also studied cultural anthropology and presented his ethnographic research Rhyme and Reason: Poetics as Societal Dialogue. His peer reviewed essay “Treading the Atlantic” appears in the special edition of the Canadian Journal of Netherlandic Studies – Netherlandic Migrations: Narratives from North America, and was presented at the Canadian Association for the Advancement of Netherlandic Studies conference as an introduction to the keynote lecture on post-colonial memory. His most recent poetry appears in Red Fez, Issue 140, The St. Louis Anthology and elsewhere. Jason has also been published in The St. Louis Post-Dispatch, and has been featured in “Never Been a Time,” a documentary about the race riots of 1919 in East St. Louis. He, along with other famed St. Louis poets, will appear in the forthcoming film Poetry In Motion: St. Louis Poets Take the Mic. More about Jason and be found at www.jvasserelong.com

Linda Neal Reising

Linda Neal Reising, a native of Oklahoma and a member of the Western Cherokee Nation, has been published in numerous journals, including The Southern Indiana Review, The Comstock Review, and Nimrod. Reising’s work has also appeared in a number of anthologies, including The Boom Project, Fruitflesh: Seeds of Inspiration for Women Who Write and Know This Place: Poetry of Indiana. She was named the winner of the 2012 Writer’s Digest Poetry Competition. Her chapbook, Re-Writing Family History (Finishing Line Press), was a finalist for the 2015 Oklahoma Book Award, as well as winner of the 2015 Oklahoma Writers’ Federation Poetry Book Prize. In 2018, her work was nominated for a Pushcart Prize by the editors of So It Goes: The Literary Journal of the Kurt Vonnegut Museum & Library. The Keeping, her first full-length book of poetry, was published by Finishing Line Press in 2020, and it recently won “Gold” in the Human Relations Indie Book Awards. Her second full-length book, Stone Roses, was published by Kelsay Books in 2021.

Stephan Delbos

Stephan Delbos is the first Poet Laureate of Plymouth, Massachusetts. He is the editor of From a Terrace in Prague: A Prague Poetry Anthology (Litteraria Pragensia, 2011). His play Chetty’s Lullaby, about trumpet legend Chet Baker, was produced in San Francisco in 2014. His play Deaf Empire, about Czech composer Bedřich Smetana, was produced by Prague Shakespeare Company in 2017. His co-translation of The Absolute Gravedigger, by Czech poet Vítězslav Nezval, was awarded the PEN/Heim Translation Grant in 2015 and was published by Twisted Spoon Press, along with as his co-translation of Nezval’s Woman in the Plural. He is the translator of Paris Notebook by Czech poet Tereza Riedlbauchová (The Visible Spectrum, 2020), and the author of the poetry chapbook In Memory of Fire (Cape Cod Poetry Review, 2016); and the poetry collections Light Reading (BlazeVOX, 2019), and Small Talk (Dos Madres Press, 2021). A Senior Lecturer at Charles University and Anglo-American University, he is also a founding editor of B O D Y.