Alex Tretbar
Poetry
Kansas City, MO
Alex Tretbar is the recipient of Ragdale’s Waud Fellowship.
Alex Tretbar is the author of the chapbooks toofarwandered (Tilted House, 2026), According to the Plat Thereof (Ethel, 2025), and Kansas City Gothic (Broken Sleep, 2025). He works in the Center for Digital and Public Humanities at the University of Missouri–Kansas City, where he is currently studying the archive of early volumes of New Letters (1934-1951) and assisting with the Kansas City Monuments Coalition. Incarcerated from 2017 to 2022 in the state of Oregon, during his years in prison he worked as a tutor, assisting fellow incarcerated people in pursuing their GEDs; co-founded and served as editor-in-chief of Free Spirit, a literary magazine made by and for incarcerated people; and co-founded and co-facilitated a creative writing program that featured instructors from Oregon State University. He currently teaches creative writing at Chillicothe Correctional Center, a women’s prison in Missouri. Recent poems, fiction, and nonfiction appear or are forthcoming in Annulet, Bat City Review, Callaloo, Capgras, Chicago Review, Cleveland Review of Books, Denver Quarterly, Fence, Full Stop, ISSUE, mercury firs, NOIR SAUNA, peel lit, VOLT, Works & Days, and elsewhere.