With National Beat Poetry Foundation CEO
Debbie Tosun Kilday [photo by Sandra Feen]

Tell a country bumpkin who I am and then let him tell you.

Performing with JJ Haaz at Mahall's
[photo by Michael Spear]

At the Lit Youngstown Fall Literary Festival
[photo by Sandra Feen]

Burroughs takes up the sledgehammer lying at the base of the wall, and like a tray of glassware hurtling down an elevator shaft, centrifugally levitated, romances blown sunflowers forever drawn to the guard rails.

—Tom Kryss, author of The Search for the Reason Why

Rattle and Numb

John B. Burroughs

​U.S. National Beat Poet Laureate, 2022-2023

John Burroughs of Cleveland is the 2022-2023 U.S. Beat Poet Laureate. A nationally touring writer and performer who has wowed audiences from New York to Oakland, Burroughs previously served for two years as Ohio's Beat Poet Laureate. He is the author of The Wrest of the Worthwhile [2023, Far Queue Press], Rattle & Numb: Selected & New Poems, 1992-2019 [2019, Venetian Spider Press] and almost twenty poetry chapbooks including Dogging Catastrophe, You Can’t Trust It to Remain, Loss and Foundering, and The Eater of the Absurd. Burroughs has also curated several regular reading series in Northeast Ohio and, since 2008, has served as the founding editor and publisher for Crisis Chronicles Press, producing over 120 titles by vital independent voices from across the U.S. and beyond.