About Jason

Jason Kirkey grew up in the Ipswich River-North Atlantic Coastal watershed of Massachusetts.  At the age of twelve he began his long apprenticeship to the earth.  Jason holds a Bachelor’s degree from Naropa University where he obtained an interdisciplinary degree in Contemplative Psychology and Environmental Studies and a Master’s in Philosophy, Cosmology, and Consciousness from the California Institute of Integral Studies.  His work is influenced by the myriad landscapes in which he has lived—the temperate forests and old mountains of New England, the red rocks and high desert of Colorado, Irish mountains and rivers, the Pacific coast and redwood trees of California—as well as Eastern philosophy, ecology, and the Celtic traditions of his ancestry.

In 2006 Jason founded Hiraeth Press which seeks to engage the ecological crisis through poetry as a transformative art.  In addition to three collections of poems, he is the author of The Salmon in the Spring: The Ecology of Celtic Spirituality (winner of a 2010 Independent Publisher Book Awards silver medal).  Currently, Jason is readying his fourth—and most mature and fermented—collection of poems, Estuaries, for publication in April 2011.  He is also working on a manuscript tentatively titled, The Riverway: Field Notes for Re-inhabiting the Earth, which blends philosophy, storytelling, and poetry with reflections on the dynamics of rivers, the language of falling rain, and the meditative presence of mountains to explore where the mind of the ecosystem meets the human psyche.