Justin Wymer is a poet, scholar, and educator. Born and raised in southwestern West Virginia, he holds degrees from Harvard University and the Iowa Writers’s Workshop. Currently, he resides in Denver, where he is pursuing a PhD in creative writing and literary arts with a focus on trauma studies and literature of excess and difficulty.
A winner of the 2012 Captain Jonathan Fay Prize from the Radcliffe Institute for best thesis out of any discipline at Harvard College, Wymer has also received awards and fellowships from Harvard Office for the Arts, University of Iowa, University of Denver, Academy of American Poets, Rockefeller Foundation, and the Spanish Ministry for Culture and Sport.
Wymer’s poems, interviews, translations, and essays have appeared in various journals, including The Adroit Journal, Atlantean Poets, Beecher’s, Boston Review‘s Poet Sampler (intro by Peter Sacks, 20 most-read poems of 2013), Columbia: A Journal of Art and Literature, Conjunctions, Harv
Wymer’s debut full-length collection, Deed, won the 2018 Antivenom Poetry Award, chosen by Jennifer Franklin, and will be published by Elixir Press in 2019.