J. Scott Brownlee

Originally from rural Texas, J. Scott Brownlee is a founding member of The Localists, a literary collective that emphasizes place-based writing of personal witness, cultural memory, and the aesthetically marginalized working class. His poems appear in The Kenyon Review, Narrative, West Branch Wired, Beloit Poetry Journal, Hayden’s Ferry Review, Devil’s Lake, RATTLE, The Greensboro Review, Borderlands: Texas Poetry Review, and elsewhere. The winner of the 2013 Button Poetry Prize for Highway or Belief, he is also the author of Ascension, which won the 2014 Robert Phillips Poetry Chapbook Prize from Texas Review Press. A former NYU Writers in the Public Schools Fellow, he lives and writes in Brooklyn.

Highway or Belief

J. Scott Brownlee’s Highway or Belief, the winner of the 2013 Button Poetry Prize.

“The violence of men, the delicacy of their broken bodies, the religiosity of the town that raised them: all of these influence Highway or Belief, which documents an America we rarely see. In J. Scott Brownlee’s Llano, Aron Anderson is the king of baseball and meth. High school football heroes become PTSD-affected war vets. The rural dead sing from the hollow flutes their bones leave in the dust. These are poems whose language begins with the body and the land. For Brownlee, the two are inseparable.”
-Dorianne Laux, author of The Book of Men

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Highway or Belief

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