Jon Sands was born in Cincinnati, Ohio. He is a winner of the 2018 National Poetry Series, selected for his second collection of poems, It’s Not Magic (Beacon Press, 2019). He is the author of The New Clean (Write Bloody Publishing), a co-host of The Poetry Gods podcast, and a curator for SupaDupaFresh, a monthly poetry series at Ode to Babel in Brooklyn. His work has been featured in The New York Times, published in The Millions, LUMINA from Sarah Lawrence College, Muzzle, Rattle, Hanging Loose, The Rattling Wall from PEN Center USA, and many others, as well as anthologized in The Best American Poetry. He has received residencies and fellowships from the Blue Mountain Center, the Brooklyn Arts Council, the Council of Literary Magazines and Presses, and the Jerome Foundation. He’s a recent MFA Graduate in Fiction from Brooklyn College, where his work won the Himan Brown Award for short stories.
He is a founding curator of Poets in Unexpected Places, a New York based artist collective that moves poetry into unconventional public spaces with free live literature performances featuring accomplished poets and an array of performance artists from varied backgrounds and aesthetics. They have been commissioned to curate “Pop Up” exhibitions in college classrooms, federal banks, museums, and much more. He is a facilitator with the Dialogue Arts Project, a non-profit organization that partners with communities in order to help participants collaborate & communicate more effectively across lines of social identity and difference. He teaches at Brooklyn College, Urban Word NYC, and facilitates a weekly writing workshop for adults at Baily House, an HIV/AIDS service center in East Harlem, a program that he founded with Gina Quattrochi in 2009. He delivered the 2010 commencement address at the Bronx Academy of Letters and the 2014 commencement address for Saranac Lake High School, and starred in the award winning web-series Verse: A Murder Mystery from Rattapallax Films. He has represented New York City numerous times at the National Poetry Slam. He tours extensively extensively as a poet, but lives in Brooklyn.
