Jamaal May is a poet, editor, and filmmaker from Detroit, MI, where he taught poetry in public schools and worked as a freelance audio engineer and touring performer. His poetry won the 2013 Indiana Review Poetry Prize and appears in journals such as Poetry, Ploughshares, The Believer, NER, and The Kenyon Review. Jamaal has earned an MFA from Warren Wilson College as well as fellowships from Cave Canem and The Stadler Center for Poetry at Bucknell University. He founded the Organic Weapon Arts Chapbook Press.

“Jamaal May’s second poetry collection, The Big Book of Exit Strategies, is a tender force with serious reckoning.”
—San Diego Review of Books

“The poems soar when May finds their center and grounds them in lived experience, revealing his genius for reframing old concepts into new images: ‘Coming black/ into the deep south,/ my friend says,/ is like returning/ to an elegant home/ you were beat in/ as a child.’”
—Publishers Weekly

“Reading Jamaal May’s poetry you might find a map out of yourself, into the pistol-full avenues where love poems compose themselves on the precarious cliffs of the loveliest collarbones.”
—Dante Di Stefano for Best American Poetry