John Beer

John Beer is the author of the poetry collection The Waste Land and Other Poems (2010), winner of the Norma Farber First Book Award from the Poetry Society of America, and the chapbook Lucinda (2013). Associative and imaginative, Beer’s work has been praised for its “passionate and watchful” moods, in the words of Norma Farber judge Bin Ramke. Ramke called The Waste Land and Other Poems “full of the most amazing engagements.”
 
Beer received his MFA from the Iowa Writers’ Workshop. He is the former literary assistant to poet Robert Lax, and the editor of Lax’s Poems (1962-1997) (2013). A former theater critic for Time Out Chicago, Beer’s criticism has appeared in Verse, the Denver Quarterly, Chicago Review, and other magazines. He currently teaches at Portland State University.