Quick Facts
Biography
Steve Kistulentz (born January 18, 1967 in Washington, DC) is an American poet and fiction writer. He is currently director of the graduate creative writing program at Saint Leo University in Florida.
Life
His first book of poems The Luckless Age was selected by Nick Flynn as the winner of the 2010 Benjamin Saltman Award and was published in early 2011 by Red Hen Press. His second book, "Little Black Daydream" was an editor's section in the Akron Series in Poetry and was published by the University of Akron Press in 2013.
His poetry has appeared in such literary magazines as The Antioch, Black Warrior, Crab Orchard, and New England Reviews, New Letters, Quarterly West and many others.
Such notable poets as MacArthur Genius Grant winner Campbell McGrath, National Book Award nominee David Kirby and Dean Young (poet) have praised his work. McGrath writes,
The Luckless Age captures the wicked energy and anarchic entropy of American culture and so gives voice to an age, a place, a human life. This is an auspicious and heartily welcome debut."
Individual poems have also won recognition from such noted poets as former Poet Laureate of the United States Mark Strand, who selected “The David Lee Roth Fuck Poem…” for the 2008 edition of the Best New Poets anthology, and by the Academy of American Poets, which included the John Mackay Shaw award-winning poem “Bargain” in the ninth volume of its Helen Burns Anthology, edited by Mark Doty. His poem "The Rosenstiel Cycle" won the 1999 Writers at Work Fellowship in Poetry. His work appeared in Barrelhouse Review.
He has taught previously at the University of Tampa, where he directed the MFA program, and at Millsaps College. He received his doctorate from the Florida State University, where he was the Edward and Marie C. Kingsbury Fellow, an award given to the outstanding graduate students in the College of Arts and Sciences; he also holds an M.F.A. from the Iowa Writers’ Workshop, where he taught creative writing as the Joseph and Ursil Callan Scholar, List of Iowa Writers' Workshop people, and was a classmate of such notable writers as Yiyun Li, Nam Le, and Daniel Alarcón.
He was awarded an M.A. from the Johns Hopkins University, and a B.A. from the College of William and Mary in Virginia.
Works
- The Luckless Age: Poems, Red Hen Press, 2011, ISBN 9781597094948
- Little Black Daydream, University of Akron Press, 2013, ISBN 9781937378202