Jeff Vande Zande

Jeff Vande Zande began to write as a poet in reaction to his father who was a fiction writer. “It was a rebellion of sorts,” he says. Some of his poems were nominated for Pushcart Prizes, and one of them was selected to appear in Ted Kooser’s syndicated newspaper column, American Life in Poetry. His poems from chapbooks were eventually collected in a book, Poems New, Used, and Rebuilt (March Street Press). Mr. Vande Zande began writing short stories seriously in 1997 and focused more on his fiction after that. “More and more, the world came to me as stories rather than poems,” he says.

Bottom Dog Press has published his Emergency Stopping and Other Stories (2004) and his novel, Landscape with Fragmented Figures (2009). Additionally, he has published a novella collected with five stories, Threatened Species (Whistling Shade Press, 2010). The author has taught for the last ten years at Delta College, a community college in Michigan that serves the cities of Midland, Bay City, and Saginaw.

American Poet comes out of his experience as a poet, as a teacher, and as a transplanted advocate of Saginaw, declaring it, “a city with a rich history that includes struggle, but also the seeds of its rebirth.”

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“Mr. Vande Zande understands attempts for grace under pressure as well as the dignity inherent in failure.”