Justin Hamm is the current Missouri Poet Laureate (2025-2027). He is the author of five books of poetry—O Death, Drinking Guinness With the Dead: Poems 2007–2021, The Inheritance, American Ephemeral, and Lessons in Ruin—as well as the creator of Poet Baseball Cards and founding editor of the museum of americana. Justin was chosen as a 2024 and 2022 Woody Guthrie Poet, a 2020 Missouri Arts Council Featured Artist, a finalist for the 2018 River Styx International Poetry Prize, and the winner of the 2014 Stanley Hanks Memorial Poetry Prize. His poems, stories, collages, and reviews have appeared in Nimrod International Journal, The Midwest Quarterly, Sugar House Review, Verse Daily, Southern Indiana Review, the New Poetry from the Midwest anthology series, and many other publications. In 2022 he delivered a performance entitled “The American Midwest: a Story in Poems” at TEDx Oshkosh, and in 2019 his poem “Goodbye, Sancho Panza” was studied by approximately 50,000 students worldwide as part of the World Scholar’s Cup curriculum.