Photo by Chuck Stewart
Jay Lee Ellis grew up between Dallas and East Texas, playing drums from age eleven in stock shows, shopping malls, and VFW halls. After graduation from Berklee College of Music, he earned degrees in writing and literature at the University of Texas Dallas (MA) and New York University (PhD). Still occasionally playing jazz, he has performed widely, from New York's Knitting Factory to Denver clubs and Red Rocks Amphitheatre - closer to his current home in Boulder. He is an Associate Professor of Teaching and an Affiliate of the Center of the American West at the University of Colorado, where he directs Hindsight Creative Nonfiction and Changing Skies: Writing Through Climate Crisis for Mission Zero.
Jay's speaking engagements on literature have included keynote addresses, lectures, and conference papers at the First International Conference on Cormac McCarthy at the JFK Institute in Berlin; the Second European Conference on McCarthy in Manchester, England; the Congres Jack London in Nevers, France; and on various authors and aspects of literature of the American West at universities and institutes across the United States. Though now writing fiction and poetry almost exclusively, he continues to serve as a reader and translation advisor for university and scholarly presses worldwide, most recently publishing a chapter in Cormac McCarthy in Context (Cambridge UP) on the future of scholarship on Cormac McCarthy and science.
Scholarly work is available from Routledge, Salem Press, Grey House Press, EBSCO, and Academia.edu as well as professional journals. Jay's creative work has appeared in North American Review, NOON, J Journal: New Writing on Justice, Confrontation, El Portal, Flash Fiction Magazine, Every Day Fiction, Litro Online, West Texas Literary Review, Dime Show Review, Juked, and Hobart. His short fiction has made Semifinalist for the American Short Fiction Short(er) Fiction Prize, Finalist for LitMag's Virginia Woolf Award and Iowa Review's Fiction Award, and won the Open Fiction Contest with Razor Lit Mag. One novel was a Finalist with Autumn House Press, and another novel most recently made Semifinalist for the Hudson Award with Black Lawrence Press.
Jay's speaking engagements on literature have included keynote addresses, lectures, and conference papers at the First International Conference on Cormac McCarthy at the JFK Institute in Berlin; the Second European Conference on McCarthy in Manchester, England; the Congres Jack London in Nevers, France; and on various authors and aspects of literature of the American West at universities and institutes across the United States. Though now writing fiction and poetry almost exclusively, he continues to serve as a reader and translation advisor for university and scholarly presses worldwide, most recently publishing a chapter in Cormac McCarthy in Context (Cambridge UP) on the future of scholarship on Cormac McCarthy and science.
Scholarly work is available from Routledge, Salem Press, Grey House Press, EBSCO, and Academia.edu as well as professional journals. Jay's creative work has appeared in North American Review, NOON, J Journal: New Writing on Justice, Confrontation, El Portal, Flash Fiction Magazine, Every Day Fiction, Litro Online, West Texas Literary Review, Dime Show Review, Juked, and Hobart. His short fiction has made Semifinalist for the American Short Fiction Short(er) Fiction Prize, Finalist for LitMag's Virginia Woolf Award and Iowa Review's Fiction Award, and won the Open Fiction Contest with Razor Lit Mag. One novel was a Finalist with Autumn House Press, and another novel most recently made Semifinalist for the Hudson Award with Black Lawrence Press.