Jason Sommer is the author of five poetry collections, most recently Portulans in the University of Chicago's Phoenix Poets Series. He has been recognized with an Anna Davidson Rosenberg Award for poems about the Jewish experience and read from his work at the National Holocaust Memorial Museum's program "Speech and Silence: Poetry and the Holocaust." A former Stanford University Stegner Fellow, he has held a Whiting Foundation writers' fellowship as well as fellowships from the Bread Loaf and Sewanee writers' conferences. With Hongling Zhang, he has published collaborative book-length translations of Chinese fiction: Wang in Love and Bondage: Three Novellas by Wang Xiaobo and The Bathing Women by Tie Ning, which was long-listed for the Man Asian Literary Prize. Sommer lives in St. Louis, Missouri.