Wes Jamison, currently an English professor, was raised in Ohio under a willow tree that his mother grew from a sapling from her mother’s own willow. When he wasn’t furiously reading (lots of Piers Anthony and KA Applegate and weird, deeply sad and existential 70’s-80’s children’s books, like Morgan and Yew), he liked to play with billy goats, trespass in condemned buildings and creeks that ran through private properties, and roll down hills.
He moved to Chicago to be part of the first cohort to earn MFAs in Nonfiction from Columbia College Chicago, where he wrote hundreds and hundreds of pages that have been largely unpublished, though some may be found in 1913: A Journal of Forms, The Boiler, South Loop Review, and Fifth Wednesday Journal; others have been finalists or semi-finalists for contests judged by the likes of Claudia Rankine, Maggie Nelson, and Chris Kraus. His greatest writerly achievements, in his opinion, have been and Melancholia being selected as a winner of Essay Press’s Chapbook Contest by Julie Carr, “No-One Suspects Your Shoulderblades of Wings” (cahoodaloodaling) being nominated for a Pushcart, and that he still writes. His current projects are numerous, though excerpts of two projects appear in Diagram 17.6 and Gertrude Press #22.
Although he no longer plays with billy goats, Wes has rescued a greyhound, Sylvia (fka Backwood Katrina). Together, they like to nap, watch the Alien franchise on repeat, sing (she really likes Cyndi Lauper and Bjork), eat apples and bananas and broccoli, smash patriarchy, and have long, complex conversations about the merits (or lack thereof) of “plot twists,” semantics, and the location of Chiron in their natal charts. But mostly nap.
