Kirk Glaser Bio

"Word by word, breath by breath, striving for understanding and connection across boundaries and experience.

"

I write poetry as I attempt to take each breath—with awareness, for awareness. Word by word, breath by breath, striving for understanding and connection across boundaries and experience. Words that expand and transform, words that stumble and fall. Words to recover our voices from a culture that weaponizes language and turns it into product. My subject matter varies—exploring family, the natural world, the nature of consciousness, scientific discoveries, social/political events—but underlying it all is a vision of connecting the personal and the historical to reveal what we need to overcome injustice and grow as spiritual beings.

My forthcoming collection, The House That Fire Built, tells the too-real story of when my wife and I inherited a house in the Santa Cruz Mountains. Mysterious events and nightmare visions haunt our family, and the house burns to the ground soon after we move in. When arson is ruled the cause, the hunt to discover who and why leads to much deeper questions and unexpected encounters. The poems explore how we worked through layers of loss and disillusion to understand the karmic forces at play as we faced human, supernatural, and internal demons, finding solace and awareness through our love, the Dharma, and the natural world.

Kirk Glaser - Bio

Events

Kirk Glaser’s poetry has been nominated twice for the Pushcart Prize and has appeared in The Threepenny Review, The American Journal of Poetry, Nimrod, Split Rock, Chicago Quarterly Review, Catamaran, The Worcester Review, and elsewhere. His poetry collection, The House That Fire Built, will be published in 2025 by MadHat Press. Awards for his work include an American Academy of Poets prize, C. H. Jones National Poetry Prize, and University of California Poet Laureate Award. He teaches writing and literature at Santa Clara University, where he serves as Director of Creative Writing and Faculty Advisor to the Santa Clara Review. He is co-editor of the anthology, New California Writing 2013, Heyday.