ISBN: 978-0-915996-16-2

Cover design by Sarah Pauls

"Jason Bradford’s Stellaphasia is a deeply moving book—his poems are both direct and mysteriously inevitable. They engender an emotional and existential spaciousness I have never known before. Bradford whose life was brief, was a master of the image and metaphor and I take comfort in these indelible poems that float in a perfect clarity and hold within them inextricably, his singular, unforgettable voice." —Malena Mörling

Jason Bradford was born in 1987 with muscular dystrophy. From the age of five, he relied on a motorized wheelchair for movement. Early on, Jason developed an interest in pursuing music, but when he arrived at Coe College in Cedar Rapids, Iowa, he learned that music majors were required to play an instrument, an impossibility for him. He soon discovered poetry, however, and learned to play linguistic music on the page. Despite his disability and the adversity associated with it, Jason was always expressive and creative, and he became an active member in the literary and arts communities. In 2010 he won the Edna Meudt Memorial Award from the National Federation of State Poetry Societies for his chapbook Remembering the Future. After receiving his BA from Coe College, he enrolled in the MA in English program at the University of Northern Iowa, where he emphasized in creative writing and worked as an editorial assistant for the North American Review. During these years, he produced a chapbook, The Inhabitants, which was published by Final Thursday Press. From UNI, he was accepted into the MFA program at the University of North Carolina-Wilmington, where he worked at the magazine Ecotone, first as a reader and then as Poetry Editor. He also worked as the Co-Editor for the poetry journal Cant. The poems in Stellaphasia consist of Jason's posthumously defended MFA thesis. His writing has appeared widely in magazines, most recently in jubilat, the Dialogist, the Laurel Review, Typo, and the North American Review. You can read a memorial post about Jason at the Kenyon Review Online: http://www.kenyonreview.org/2016/01/in-memoriam-jason-bradford/