Christopher Bogart

Christopher Bogart is a retired educator and a working poet and writer with BS in Liberal Arts from St. Peter’s College/University, an MA, and MFA in Creative Writing from Monmouth University.

He is the founder/member of Jersey Shore Poets, and organizes an annual public poetry reading each April to celebrate National Poetry Month, “Poets Live!” This event has been taken place for fourteen years at The Eatontown Library, Monmouth County Library/Eastern Branch and Holmdel Branch, and online.

His poetry has been published in Voices Rising from the Grove, Spindrift, WestWard Quarterly, Saggio Poetry Journal, The Monmouth Review (2013 and 2014, 2020, 2022), Mind Murals (2013), Whirlwind Review (Fall 2014), The Howl of Sorrow, A Collection of Poetry Inspired by Hurricane Sandy, This Broken Shore (Summer 2015. 2018, 2023, 2024), Jersey Shore Poets/First Edition, The Poeming Pidgeon 2022, Poetry for Ukraine 2022, The Rutherford Red Wheelbarrow 15, New Jersey Bards Poetry Review 2023, 2024, Rhyme and PUNishment Anthology, Poetry Super Highway, 2024, Letters for the End Times, 2 (Collapse Press) Eastern Sea Bards Poetry Anthology (Local Gems Press) as well as various online sites.

As a published writer, his music and concert reviews have appeared in Back Stage Pass (July 1984, August 1984), His review of the first book of poetry by Natalie Diaz, When My Brother Was an Aztec, was published in Pleiades Journal (Winter 2014). Recently, one of his short stories, “The Curfew,” was published in Ghosts, Echoes & Shadows, Poems and Stories for the Halloween Season (LG Press, 2024).

In 2015, he was chosen as First Runner Up for Monmouth University’s inaugural The Joyce Carol Oates Award for Excellence in Fiction, Poetry, and Creative Non-Fiction. In 2017, he was chosen as one of two finalists for The Brian Turner Literary Prize for Fiction.

In 2018, his chapbook about the Yuma 14, entitled 14: Antología del Sonoran, was awarded third place in The Poetry Box Chapbook Contest and was published in October of 2018 by The Poetry Box and nominated for a Pushcart Prize for his poem, “Abraham Morales Hernandez.”

In April of 2020, The Poetry Box published his chapbook entitled Breakpoint about Trump’s America and a full book of poetry in May about the plight of Central American migrants entitled The Eater of Dreams.

In June of 2022, The Poetry Box released a new volume of his poetry, This Conversation, a discussion about systemic racism in our society today between two white strangers in a bar over a few beers.

In November of 2023, Blast Press released a poetic tribute to twenty-five of the poets who influenced his writing, and was titled Bards of Passion and Mirth.

A book of poetry about the war in Ukraine, соняшники/ Sunflowers was released in February of 2024. It is color illustrated with the artwork of Ukrainian artist, Beata Kurkul, and published by Penguin Book Writers. The proceeds of this book benefit Operation White Stork, an organization that provides IFAKs (Individual First Aid Kits) to Ukrainian soldiers.

He has organized two online poetry readings in September of 2024, called SPEAK OUT FOR UKRAINE! featuring ten Ukrainian poets who read their poems on the war to an international audience of poets.

In the spring of 2025, he compiled, edited, and published Silence Is Consent. It was a collection of the work of 83 poets throughout the US to serve as a platform for poetic resistance to Project 2025 and the policies of the Trump administration. The anthology was published through his own imprint, Casablanca Press. During the summer, he will host a series of virtual readings, Breaking the Silence! which will include many of the 83 poets from the collection.

In June of 2025, he published his second book of poetry under his own imprint, Casablanca Press, titled etc. It has, as a

subtitle, “a book of poetry about humor, whimsy … and whatever the hell else popped into my head at the time.”

On August 1, 2005, while still teaching in Long Branch High School, he presented a paper on the importance of poetry in the teaching of literature and writing to the Oxford Round Table at the Oxford Union Debate Hall at Oxford University.

He is presently working on a recorded reading of his book, This Conversation, with 12 other poets, that will be available at no cost to schools, churches, and universities as an aid to a comprehensive conversation about race. He is co-authoring an epistolary book of poetry with poet and literary entrepreneur James C. Ellerbe about race in America titled The Next Conversation, writing short stories, translating the poetry of Federico Garcia Lorca, Sergei Esenin, and Arthur Rimbaud into English.

He is also working on a personal memoir titled You Must Be Somebody, a poetic autobiography titled A Life of My Own, as well as working to complete his first novel, tentatively titled The Beast, about the plight of two Central American teenage migrants who flee poverty and crime in search of a better life in America.