B. 1974

Jasper Bernes grew up in Topanga Canyon in California. He earned a BA from Hampshire College, an MFA from Cornell University, and a PhD from the University of California, Berkeley. He is the author of the poetry collections Starsdown (2007) and We Are Nothing and So Can You (2015). Reviewing Bernes’s first book in the Believer, Stephen Burt notes that “Bernes’s writings take on the what-is-real, what-is-mine questions raised by modern life amid digital media; they depict, too, our need for excitement, for something to do.”

Bernes’s critical work focuses on 20th- and 21st-century poetry, Marxism and labor theory, and new media. His scholarly book, The Work of Art in the Age of Deindustrialization (2017), examines the role of workplace culture and management theory in postmodern American poetry. With Joshua Clover and Juliana Spahr, Bernes edits the press Commune Editions. He is currently a visiting assistant professor at Stanford University and lives in Berkeley with his family.