James Crews was the 2009 recipient of the Prairie Schooner Bernice Slote Award for Emerging Writers. He is the author of What Has Not Yet Left, winner of the 2009 Copperdome Prize; One Hundred Small Yellow Envelopes; and Bending the Knot, winner of the 2008 Gertrude Press Chapbook Prize. He lives in Portland, Oregon.

Books by James Crews:

About The Book of What Stays:

"Crews’s aptly titled debut collection has staying power galore. In his lyrical, pitch-perfect renditions of regret and loss, this poet bears exacting witness to the parallel world of acceptance and renewal animated everywhere by the dizzying physics of human grace under pressure. In describing a homeless woman’s cart brimming with empty cans and copper wiring—the ‘shining and weighty cargo / of grief she’s headed to redeem’—Crews shows us where he’s going, too. And when he elsewhere promises ‘a fast river you can follow to its source / if you believe the motto here has always been Forward,’ the poet’s hard-won optimism is nothing less than a revitalizing tonic. When all is said, if not quite done, what stays with the reader are these bracing poems: sustenance for the undeniably long haul."
—David Clewell