I’m Julian O. Long, a retired educator now living in Saint Louis, Missouri. For many years I was a school teacher, working in various universities. Most recently I conducted a senior honors seminar entitled Great Books at Saint Louis University. Read about it here if you like.

I have written poetry most of my life, from early experiments in rhyming in grade school to lines scribbled in a sketch book during my college years. I’ve published off and on since 1960 when I had a poem in the Aspen, CO Times, but my writing took off when I attended Graduate School at Duke in the late 1960s. These days, at 84, I’m still at it. I have a contract with myself to write a poem every day, following Wm. Stafford. Some of the publications for which I have written are: Sewanee Review, Pembroke Magazine, New Mexico Magazine, New Texas, The Piker Press, and Better than Starbucks. My chapbook, High Wire Man, is number twenty-two in the Trilobite Poetry Chapbook series published by the University of North Texas Libraries. A collection of my poems, Reading Evening Prayer in an Empty Church was issued by Backroom Window Press in 2016

I am a New Mexican by birth and a Texan by adoption, educated at Southern Methodist and Duke Universities. My beloved and I moved to Saint Louis in 2002, where we live in an old house in the South Grand area, not far from Tower Grove Park. I’m guessing we’re about three miles from the Mississippi as well, though you can’t get there as the crow flies.

bona fides . . . write to me