Jeff Kass – författare

Teacher/Pizza Guy is a collection of autobiographical poems from the 2016-17 school year in which Jeff Kass worked as a full-time English teacher and a part-time director for a literary arts organization and still had to supplement his income by delivering pizzas a few nights a week. In the collection, Kass is unapologetically political without distracting from the poems themselves but rather adds layers and nuances to the fight for the middle class and for educators as a profession. The timing of this book is beyond relevant. As a public high school teacher in America, Kass's situation is not uncommon. In September 2018, Time published an article detailing the ways in which many public school teachers across the country and in a variety of environments work multiple jobs to help make ends meet. Teacher/Pizza Guy chronicles Kass's experience of teaching, directing, feeding people, and treading the delicate balance of holding himself accountable to his wife and kids, his students, his customers, and his own mental and physical health while working three jobs in contemporary America. The journey of that year was draining, at times daunting, at times satisfying, but always surprising. Many of the ideas for these poems were initially scribbled onto the backs of pizza receipts or scratched out during precious free moments amidst the chaos of the school day. A driving force behind the book is Philip Levine's poem ""What Work Is,"" which Kass believes attempts to examine not only the dignity and complexity of what we think physical, tangible work is but also the exhausting, albeit sometimes fulfilling nature of emotional work. Teacher/Pizza Guy is a funny and relatable collection for readers, thinkers, educators, and pizza lovers everywhere.

"True Believer is Jeff Kass at his best: reflective and clobbery, nerdy and dynamic, witty and wise.”—Adam Mansbach,  author of Go the F*ck to Sleep and The Golem of BrooklynIn True Believer, Jeff Kass intertwines fiction with reality as he delves into the origins of the Marvel superheroes, explores how the Marvel saga informed his own worldview, and implores us all to continue to believe in the forces of goodThrough lyric and narrative poems, formal and informal verse, and even a trio of limericks, Kass’s poems both retell classic comic book tales and recall his personal experiences being a True Believer—attending New York City Comic-Con with his childhood friends, wishing he could control the weather while coaching his son’s baseball team, and growing up reading about the Jewishness of The Thing, the Golem-like member of The Fantastic Four, which impacted Kass’s understanding of his own identity.An ode to what Stan Lee called his devoted readers, True Believer is a call to arms and an invitation to discover the heroic in ourselves. If we can’t be super-powered heroes, we can endeavor to be what those heroes embody: perseverance despite personal doubt, determination in the face of calamitous odds, and faith in the notion that humanity is worth saving.