Tony Brewer is a poet and audio artist from Bloomington, where he is executive director of the Spoken Word Stage at the 4th Street Festival of the Arts and Crafts and co-producer of the Writers Guild Spoken Word Series and the Urban Deer Performance Series. He has published 12 books and chapbooks, including most recently Centaur (with Jonathan S Baker, Dark Heart Press) and Good Job, Lightning (Stubborn Mule Press). 

Brewer was born in Crawfordsville and grew up in Ladoga. He graduated from Indiana University with an English degree and has worked as a book compositor at Indiana University Press for 25 years. He co-founded the town/gown arts collective MATRIX in 1998 and, working with IU faculty and students as well as local writers, produced publications, exhibitions, and events, including the Words on Wheels display of poems in Bloomington Transit buses. He also co-founded the first nationally recognized poetry slam in Indiana in 2001 and hosted slams and coached and traveled with teams across the Midwest for a decade. He is a founding member of the all-Indiana poetry performance troupe Reservoir Dogwoods. 

Tony has hosted and produced scores of monthly and one-off poetry and spoken word events, most recently for the Writers Guild at Bloomington, which he has been a member of since 2011 and has served as chair, treasurer, and grant writer. He was a recording engineer for poetry programs on WFHB community radio from 2003-2006, through which he met many Indiana writers while learning from producer Jenny Kander how to “collect poets.” He is a judge and panelist for numerous local and state literary competitions and grants, including the National Society of Arts and Letters, Scholastic Writing Awards, and Poetry Out Loud. He has led workshops and facilitated programs in libraries and elementary and high schools, including a FrankenFest in 2018, celebrating the 200th anniversary of Mary Shelley’s Frankenstein. 

An avid typewriter enthusiast from an early age, Tony has been offering custom-made Poetry On Demand at coffeehouses, museums, cemeteries, churches, bars, and art and music festivals all over Indiana for fifteen years, often recruiting poets from around the state and beyond to join in. He is an alumni and frequent artist in residence at Osage Arts Community in Belle, Missouri, where he collaborates with other poets in their letterpress print shop. 

Brewer is also a nationally recognized live sound effects (Foley) artist primarily for live audio theatre. He has performed coast to coast and has taught Foley at Michigan University, Kansas City Art Institute, HEAR Now Festival, and Indiana University. For his Foley work, he has received the Bradshaw Award from the American Society for Science Fiction Audio at CONvergence in Minneapolis and was made a Kentucky Colonel at the International Mystery Writers Festival in Owensboro. He is a frequent collaborator with experimental music & field recording ensemble ORTET.