Chad Prevost

Poet · Writer · Retreat Leader — Chattanooga, Tennessee

Some things can only be reached by going under.

I write poems and essays about surrender, attention, and the life beneath the life. And I sit with people — on retreat, in conversation — who are ready to listen to their own.

Mirage and Tar by Chad Prevost — long-exposure photograph of blurred figures on a city street

§ 01 · New Collection · Summer 2026

Mirage and Tar

"…strong music, a stone blind love of language (the only kind of love that matters), and a wild, wild heart." —Tom Lux

Chad Prevost's fourth full-length collection maps the intricate spaces between what we know and what we feel — the sudden absences, the shifting landscapes, the startling moments where our certainties fall away.

Read two poems from the collection →
…songs trapped in layers to plow over and salt for ice and snow and then to shimmer on the road in the heat as mirage and tar. from the title poem

§ 02 · The Work

Three rooms off the same hall.

§ 03 · A Word on the Work

For twenty years I have worked with words and the people who make them: as a poet, an editor, a seminary-trained student of the inner life, and the founder of two presses.

Everything on this site comes from a single conviction — that a life will speak, if you build it a quiet place to do so.

Serious books find their way into the world through Crossroads Publishing Group, the press I founded and run.

I also speak, write commissioned poems for occasions, and — rarely — write a life.

A forthcoming work of contemplative nonfiction, To Let Go and Go Under: The Gift of Becoming Nobody, publishes through Crossroads Press. About the book →

§ 04 · In Other People's Words

"This is the kind of work I admire — clear with subject and craft and thought. Great music, intelligence, speculation."Christopher Buckley · on the poems
"It's essential reading for recovering our hearts, our minds, our souls."Jerry Colonna · author of Reboot, on Shock Point
"If anyone ever deserved to be called a gentleman and a scholar, it's Chad… a man whose word is his bond."Terence Hawkins · founding director, Yale Writers' Workshop