J. Scott Brownlee is a former Writers in the Public Schools Fellow at New York University, where he taught poetry to undergraduates and fifth graders through the Teachers & Writers Collaborative. Involved with several literary journal start-ups, he was the managing editor and co-founder of both Hothouse and The Raleigh Review. A Pushcart Prize nominated poet-of-place, Brownlee writes primarily about the people and landscape of rural Texas and is a founding member of The Localists, a new literary movement that emphasizes place-based writing of personal witness, cultural memory, and the aesthetically marginalized working class. His first full-length collection, REQUIEM FOR USED IGNITION CAP, was a finalist for the National Poetry Series, selected by C. Dale Young as the winner of the 2015 Orison Poetry Prize, and received the 2016 Bob Bush Memorial Award for Best First Book of Poetry from the Texas Institute of Letters. He is also the author of three prize-winning chapbooks: HIGHWAY OR BELIEF (2013 Button Poetry Prize), ASCENSION (2014 Robert Phillips Poetry Prize), and ON THE OCCASION OF THE LAST OLD CAMP MEETING IN LLANO COUNTY (2015 Tree Light Books Prize). Brownlee currently lives in in Austin and is at work on DIAMOND KINGS, a novel and A LITTLE BIT OF HARDLY ANYTHING, a second full-length poetry collection. Both manuscripts are rooted in rural Texas.