ABOUT BRUCE LOWRY ...

Bruce Lowry is a Louisiana native, and “searcher,” whose poetry, essays and journalism have been broadly praised and honored. His writing has been shaped in part by his adolescence growing up in the Deep South of the 1960s and ’70s, and has also been influenced by his parents’ stories from their childhood in the sharecropper South of Great Depression era. His poems, short stories, and essays have been published widely.

His poetry chapbook, “Boyhood, Louisiana” (Platform Review), was published in 2019. He has been thrice nominated for the Pushcart Prize and was twice awarded Honorable Mention for the Allen Ginsberg Prize. In 2014, he received an MFA in Poetry from Drew University, where his art came under the influence of numerous poets and mentors, including Michael Waters, Alicia Ostriker and Jean Valentine. His essay on the favelas of Rio de Janeiro, “Rio’s Teeming Favelas Are a World Apart,” written in 2001 during his time in Brazil as part of a Pew Journalism Fellowship, was duly anthologized and praised. In 2004, while working for the Anniston Star (Ala.), he earned Best Op-ed Feature Award from the National Association of Opinion Page Editors. In 2018, while Opinion Page Editor for the Bergen Record (N.J.), he was awarded first place for Editorial Writing by the New Jersey Press Association.

He has also taught literature, composition, and history at the college level. He currently works as a senior communication associate in the State Legislature in Trenton, New Jersey, and continues to write both as an essayist and poet. Like Keats, Bashō and Tolstoy, he enjoys taking long walks to no place in particular. He lives with his partner, and assorted cats in a 1950s house in Union County, New Jersey.

Read about his new collection of poetry, Salvage.