Washington Writers' Publishing House

Washington Writers’ Publishing House is the longest, continuously-operating cooperative nonprofit literary small press in the United States

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Jason Gebhardt

Jason Gebhardt’s poems have appeared in The Southern Review, Poet Lore, Tinderbox Poetry Journal, Gargoyle, Tar River Poetry and many other journals.  His chapbook Good Housekeeping won the 2016 Cathy Smith Bowers Prize. He is the recipient of multiple artist fellowships from the DC Commission on the Arts and Humanities. He lives in Washington, DC with his family and works as a preschool teacher. 

WWPH 50th Anniversary Editor's Poetry Prize

Testimonials

  • “From the opening lines of Jason Gebhardt’s brilliant Dictionary of Air –“Now the light is on”—we get the impression that the speaker is a seeker, a mystic, floating in a world of “wind knocking the window/quiet with the emptiness of clocks.” What’s fascinating about Dictionary of Air is the way it dreams itself a family, a nation, a universe in which the rules we all live by are seen to be as strange and uncanny as they really always are, all the while connecting the speaker’s lineage to the life of his G-man grandfather, and the lives of his children, and to Dickinson’s life, her poetry, he says, like a sparrow freed from a downspout: “wherever I am, I hear it.” Gebhardt’s formal mastery in his prose poems and his concrete poems, state-shaped, and his delicate lyrics, like the final poem, “Poem,” are to me extraordinary contributions to the art.

     A poet of the highest caliber, Jason Gebhardt has written a truly remarkable debut.”

    David Keplinger, author of Ice, winner of the Rome Prize