BIO

Jesse Breite, native of Little Rock, Arkansas, currently lives in Atlanta, Georgia, with his wife, Emily, and their two kids. Jesse’s poetry has appeared or is forthcoming in Prairie Schooner, Rhino, New Orleans Review, Crab Orchard Review, The Chattahoochee Review, Tar River Poetry, Fourteen Hills, San Pedro River Review, Ruminate, Anglican Theological Review and many other journals and magazines. He has been featured in Town Creek Poetry and The Southern Poetry Anthology, Volume V: Georgia. Breite has read for The Decatur Book Festival and The Georgia Poetry Society. His poem, “Space Odyssey,” was featured downtown as part of Elevate Atlanta 2012, and he has been a finalist in book prizes from The Texas Review Press, Red Mountain Press, Glass Lyre Press, and Mercer Press. FutureCycle Press published his chapbook, The Knife Collector, in 2013. His full-length collection is forthcoming (Fall 2025) from Fernwood Press.

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Breite started collaborating with Atlanta Composer Michael Kurth in 2015. Since then, he has written libretto for three of Atlanta Composer Michael Kurth’s scores, Magnificat, Tenebrae, and Miserere, the latter of which the Atlanta Symphony Orchestra performed in March 2018 and recorded in 2019 on the ASO’s album on Michael Kurth’s works, Everything Lasts Forever.  

Currently, Jesse teaches and serves as English Department Chair at The Westminster Schools in Atlanta but has taught high school English for 20 years in Chicago, Baltimore, and Asheville. He is an award-winning teacher and has published on teaching practice in EdWeek Teacher. Jesse has also been awarded multiple summer study grants from the National Endowment for the Humanities and Mercer University. 

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​Image: "Foggy Path (monochrome). Two Rivers Park. Little Rock. 2019." by issafly is licensed under CC BY-NC-SA 2.0