Jay Leeming

Born in Ithaca, New York in 1969, Jay Leeming is the author of Dynamite on a China Plate (Backwaters Press, 2006) and Miracle Atlas (Writers and Books, 2011). He earned a BA in music from Bates College in 1991 and an MFA from New School University in 2001.

Leeming’s work is characterized by what Robert Bly has praised as his “surprising angle of vision,” and is informed as well by his years spent as a singer, songwriter and guitarist in Minneapolis, Minnesota. His poems are also wide-ranging, able to embrace both darkness and humor and, in the words of Li-Young Lee, to move “effortlessly between the rational and irrational, the conscious and unconscious, accounting for the multiplicity of human desire and imagination.”

Leeming is also an accomplished storyteller who has brought story to classrooms, workshops, and the high mountains of Yosemite National Park. He has taught poetry workshops throughout the United States and abroad, and is the recipient of a Creative Writing Fellowship from the National Endowment for the Arts. In 2010 he was Summer Poet in Residence at the University of Mississippi, and from 2010 to 2013 he was editor of the journal Rowboat: Poetry in Translation. He spends his summers working as a ranger-naturalist in Yosemite National Park and otherwise makes his home in Ithaca, New York.