Poet Elijah Burrell continues to prove that poetry is alive and well in mid-Missouri.

Elijah Burrell’s journey to becoming a published poet began in high school when he penned a
love song to a girlfriend. Today, the native mid-Missourian is the author of three books of poetry:
“The Skin of the River,” “Troubler,” and “Skies of Blur.” Along the way, he’s also had numerous
poetic pieces published in a variety of respected magazines and journals. That first love song also
proved to be successful as the girlfriend later became Elijah’s wife.

While Elijah’s foray into writing began simply and at a young age, it sparked a passion inside him that ultimately grew into a literary career. He first fell in love with poetry in college; he says he especially loved the fact that a poem can tell a novel’s worth of information in just a few lines.

Elijah’s skills further evolved as he began writing about his own life and the lives of those around him, committing their stories to paper in the form of poetry. Over time, a manuscript of published poetry emerged, and Elijah felt ready to send his work out into the world.

But, as with most writers, this didn’t happen overnight.

“I didn’t wake up one day and decide to become an author,” Elijah says. “I first wrote because I felt like I had to, like I had a lot inside me I wanted to share.”

Trying to get his work published was “like casting a line and watching it drop into a big ocean and nothing bites,” Elijah recalls.

But eventually, his perseverance paid off. Aldrich Press picked up the rights to his first collection of poems, “The Skin of the River,” which debuted in 2014. “Troubler” followed in 2018, and “Skies of Blur,” published by EastOver Press, became Elijah’s third published work in 2024.

Elijah feels his work doesn’t fit neatly into any one category of poetry, though he’s been told people find his pieces to be narrative and lyrical in nature. He notes that “some poems feel like they fall right out of the sky,” while others are projects he has worked on for years.

“Poetry is where my heart is,” Elijah says. “I like poetry because it resists the urge to rush. It asks the reader to slow down and pay attention. If you don’t, you’re probably not going to get it.”

One particular poem stands out among the many Elijah has written. “Reverberations,” a piece that appears in “Troubler,” examines what it means for someone when a loved one passes away. Elijah wrote the poem following his mother’s death from cancer in 2014, pouring his grief out on paper.

By day, the poet and author is a professor of English and creative writing at Lincoln University, a position he’s held for 14 years. He teaches his students that poetry gives them a friend they didn’t know they had, a feeling he also hopes his readers take away from his work.

“If they can open a door into a poem and walk into it… and say ‘I recognize that; that’s something I’ve lived’ or ‘I have seen that before, and I can relate to that,’ it helps the reader feel less alone,” Elijah says.

For Elijah, fulfillment comes when a reader tells him a poem “made them feel seen; that they encountered something in a poem that felt familiar to them, but they had never known how to express that familiarity.”

With a fourth collection in the works, Elijah feels he can tackle his writing with a little more flexibility these days. He anticipates a fifth book at some point down the line and is also working on other writing projects.

In the end, he wants people to know poetry is still living and breathing in mid-Missouri, the place that has shaped his writing ever since he was a young boy growing up on a gravel road in Ashland, Missouri.

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Elijah’s books can be found online at Barnes and Noble, Target, and Amazon, as well as on Aldrich Press’ and EastOver Press’ websites, as well as his own website.