Alexander Shalom Joseph : part one

It's said in the Talmud that there are three ways to be a good Jew: study, prayer and acts of loving kindness– Alexander Shalom Joseph thinks of his writing and work as a teacher as a mix of all three. Alexander’s debut collection of short stories, American Wasteland, is forthcoming from Above Owl Canyon Press in late 2021 and can be pre ordered here. Alexander's poetry chapbook, Buttons and Bones, was published by above/ground press in 2021. His Novels and Short Stories have been short listed/finalists/or semi-finalists in the 2021 Autumn House Rising Writer Prize in Fiction, the 2020 Orison Fiction prize, the 2020 Paper Nautilus Chapbook Prize, and the 2020, 2019 and 2018 Faulkner Awards for a “Novel in Progress," have been published by Tulip Tree Press, Witty Partition, Zodiac Magazine, Lotus Eater Magazine, Bombay Gin and in Clover: A Literary Rag, and have received four honorable mentions in New Writer Competitions for Glimmer Train Magazine. His poetry has appeared in Blaze Vox, Boomer Lit Mag and in Dusie’s Tuesday poems. Alexander is the host of the podcast of American Wasteland, and writes a weekly prose poetry column in The Mountain Ear Newspaper in Nederland, Colorado. Alexander has an MFA from The Jack Kerouac School, and lives in a cabin in the woods of Colorado with his girlfriend and hundreds of books. 

What are you working on? 

I live in a mountain town with a population of around 2000, in which I write weekly poems for the local newspaper. These poems are brief ten to fifteen line mediations on natural beauty, working class rural life, fear of destruction from climate change as well as other poetic forays into concerns and passions. Over the last year and a half I have written about seventy poems for the paper and am compiling them into a book called “Our Mother the Mountain.”