John Brehm was born in Lincoln, Nebraska, and educated at the University of Nebraska and Cornell University. He is the author of Sea of Faith, which won the 2004 Brittingham Prize and was published by The University of Wisconsin Press. In the Georgia Review, Judith Kitchen praised Sea of Faith for its “unified consistency of tone and sophistication of approach,” remarking that the “voice is urbane, humorous, and amused—distanced just enough to poke fun at the world and itself alike, to be able to see the ironies in every predicament.” Kitchen finds that Brehm’s poems give “voice to the complexities of being, handing us back to ourselves through the surety of his craft.”

In awarding Sea of Faith the Brittingham Prize, Carl Dennis described a speaker who is “both self-mocking and self-accepting, taking his concerns seriously but always distant enough from them to regard them as a small part of a larger human story, a story we recognize at once to be our own.” 

Brehm has published a chapbook titled, The Way Water Moves (2002). His poems have appeared in Poetry, The Gettysburg Review, The Southern Review, Boulevard, Gulf Coast, The Missouri Review, New England Review, The Best American Poetry 1999 and elsewhere. He has taught at Cornell, Emerson College, and Portland State University and received fellowships from Oregon Literary Arts and Yaddo. A freelance writer, he has lived and worked in Brooklyn, New York, and Boulder, Colorado.