Please join us in giving a warm welcome to our Featured Client, Ken Haas! As a poet, Ken has a unique narrative ability; that is to say, he is not only a master of verse, but also of storytelling. He can transport the reader to colonial India, 1950s Atlantic City, or a contemporary American apartment building—introducing him/her to a vibrant cast of characters along the way—all in under a page. Appropriately, his work has appeared in such prestigious publications as Schuylkill Valley Journal Of The Arts, as well as in anthologies like The Place That Inhabits Us (Sixteen Rivers Press, 2010). We are proud to have him as a Writer’s Relief client! (Watch his short video.)

In Ken Haas’s Own Words

Though I love, love, love to write poems, I find the “business of poetry,” i.e., the process of sending my work out for publication, singularly enervating. There’s just nothing fun about it, from the cover letters to navigating the motley crew of requirements, to divining which journals are looking for what and when, to addressing the envelopes and licking the stamps. Writer’s Relief has liberated me from all of this administrivia and increased the time I have to write by an order of magnitude. Plus, they do their work with class, and my acceptance rate has grown significantly while I’ve had them on my team. They get it!

More About Ken Haas

Ken Haas was born in New York City; went to college, law school, and business school at Harvard University; and received an MA in English literature at the University of Sussex, U.K., where he wrote his thesis on Wallace Stevens and the “poetry of place.” He now lives in San Francisco where he is a partner in a healthcare venture capital firm. An avid skier, bike rider, sea kayaker, yoga practitioner, and volunteer, he has created (and continues to sponsor) a weekly poetry writing program that employs two poet-teachers from California Poets in the Schools.

His work has appeared or is forthcoming in Alabama Literary Review, Caesura, The Cape Rock, Forge, The Coachella Review, Crack The Spine, Freshwater, Hawai’i Pacific Review, Helix, Natural Bridge, Pisgah Review, Quiddity, Red Wheelbarrow, Schuylkill Valley Journal Of The Arts, Squaw Valley Review, Stickman Review, Tattoo Highway, and Wild Violet. His poetry has been anthologized in The Place That Inhabits Us (Sixteen Rivers Press, 2010) and the Marin Poetry Center Anthology (2012, 2013). He has participated several times in the Squaw Valley Community of Writers.