How to Be Better by Being Worse

As part of Writers in the Schools, he has led classrooms at Field Elementary School, the High School for Law and Justice, and M.D. Anderson Cancer Hospital. He is the recipient of both the Inprint Marion Barthelme Prize and the Inprint Verlaine Prize in Poetry. In 2019, his poems appeared in both Best New Poets and Best of the Net, and Copper Nickel nominated his poem “Leather Jacket” for a Pushcart Prize. His poem “Flamingosexual” won the 2020 Pinch Literary Award. His writing has also appeared—or is forthcoming—in Hobart, Houston Chronicle, Lana Turner, New Ohio Review, Out, Palette Poetry, The Southeast Review, Split Lip Magazine, and Yale Review.

He frequently teaches workshops for Inprint, Grackle & Grackle, and Writespace.

Now finishing his Ph.D. in Literature and Creative Writing at the University of Houston, Justin served a two-year term as Editor-in-Chief of Gulf Coast: A Journal of Literature and Fine Arts.

The University of Iowa awarded him a Teaching-Writing Fellowship in 2013 and named him the Provost’s Visiting Writer in Poetry in 2014.

He worked as a freelance pop culture writer in New York City before moving to Iowa to attend the Iowa Writers’ Workshop

he attended Yale University, where he won the 2009 Albert Stanburrough Cook Prize for Poetry

I must have heard the engine

crank, the break

release and then?

In the intervening years, I’ve read about

battered women who come to see all men

as accomplices in their abuse.

It might’ve been the first time I ever hated her,

as if she were my child, sucking her thumb

instead of getting us through

the moment with less pain.

a man so tall and gentle I think I believed

he was religion itself.