Middle-America's most engaging authors since 1998.
Middle-America's most engaging authors since 1998.
Originally from the flatlands of central Illinois, Justin Hamm now lives near Twain territory in Missouri. He is the author of four books of poetry, Drinking Guinness With the Dead: Poems 2007-2021, The Inheritance, American Ephemeral, and Lessons in Ruin, and a book of photographs entitled Midwestern. He is also the creator of Poet Baseball Cards and the founding editor of the museum of americana.
A Woody Guthrie Poet in 2024 and 2022, Justin has been chosen as a 2020 Missouri Arts Council Featured Artist, a finalist for the 2018 River Styx International Poetry Prize, and the winner of the 2014 Stanley Hanks Memorial Poetry Prize. In 2022 he delivered a performance entitled “The American Midwest: a Story in Poems” at TEDx Oshkosh. The recording can be viewed on YouTube. In 2019, Justin’s poem “Goodbye, Sancho Panza” was studied by approximately 50,000 students worldwide as a part of the World Scholar’s Cup curriculum.
Justin’s individual poems, stories, photographs, collages, and reviews have appeared in Nimrod International Journal, The Midwest Quarterly, Sugar House Review, Verse Daily, Southern Indiana Review, the New Poetry from the Midwest anthology series, and many other publications. Additionally, his award-winning photographs have featured in numerous solo gallery shows. His poetry/photography hybrid exhibition “Midwestern” traveled the Midwest region from 2018-2020.
By Justin Hamm
Published: 2024
Erasure poetry only works when you choose the right text to draw from. Though Justin Hamm’s O Death takes its roots from the work of several different authors, it all comes together as one voice, Hamm’s. What remains is heart, is struggle, is joy, is lament and a true sense of the modern cultural landscape. While the original authors may well have planted the seeds, Hamm has tended the garden and these poems, now solely his, have become a rare thing of beauty.”
~ John Dorsey, Pocatello Wildflower
Through masterful erasure, Justin Hamm whittles works by literary and Delta Blues luminaries into spare bones scaffolds upon which he hangs portraits of his inner world alongside tableaus of his beloved Midwest. Hear the slide guitar accompanying Hamm's plea in "Prayer to the Absent Father." In "Communion," feel the laughter passed around like bottles of beer to counter despair. Hamm’s poems sing the possibilities of songs we need right now.
~ Amy Baskin, Night Hag and SKULL
With undeniable intelligence, wit, and plenty of dark humor, Justin Hamm wrestles with mortality, eschewing easy answers. This collection is a brief testament to one man’s pursuit of self-knowledge through “the cobwebby dark underneath” where the wish for returning with “fists full of everything that was taken,” is acknowledged to be futile, but nevertheless, worth the fight.
~ Frank Paino, Pieta and Obscura