Jason Sommer

After five poetry collections, Jason Sommer recently published his first book of non-fiction, the memoir Shmuel’s Bridge: Following the Tracks to Auschwitz with My Survivor Father (Charlesbridge). Mirror Stage, from Unbound Edition Press, his sixth volume, follows Portulans (Chicago). Among other awards, his books have been honored with a Society of Midland Author’s Prize for Other People’s Troubles (Chicago) and the Crab Orchard Review Prize for The Laughter of Adam and Eve (Southern Illinois). A former Stegner Fellow at Stanford, Sommer has won a Whiting Foundation Writers’ Award and has held fellowships at the Bread Loaf and Sewanee writer’s conferences as well as a residency from the National Writer’s Voice Project of the YMCA. He has been recognized with an Anna Davidson Rosenberg Award for poems about the Jewish experience and selected to read from his work at the National Holocaust Museum’s program “Speech and Silence: Poetry and the Holocaust. He has published translations of Irish language poems and, with Hongling Zhang, collaborative translations of Chinese fiction: Wang in Love and Bondage:Three Novellas by Wang Xiaobo and The Bathing Women by Tie Ning, which was longlisted for the Man Asia Literary Prize. For more about the author see: www.jasonsommer.com.