Monday, 12 October 2015
Sign-up at 8, show starts at 8:30, Jed will be featured around 9:20
Special note: Jed’s performance will consist entirely of songs of his own composition.
(Photo: © Rosanne Olson)
JED MYERS was born in Philadelphia in 1952 to parents of Eastern European Jewish heritage. He studied Creative Writing with an emphasis in poetry at Tufts University, graduating in 1974, and went on, after medical training, to pursue a career in psychiatry. He settled in Seattle, where he and his wife raised three children. He kept writing poems, but did not begin to seek publication until the events of September 11th, 2001. Since that time, his work has been widely published, and for several years now he hosts the popular music-and-poetry open-mic cabaret NorthEndForum (now part of the Easy Speak Seattle alliance).
Jed maintains a solo therapy practice and teaches at the University of Washington.
Read an interview with Jed in Blotterature.
Jed has written an award-winning volume of poems:
Winner of the 2013 Sacramento Poetry Center Press Book Award.
Honorable Mention in Poetry, 2015 San Francisco Book Festival.
“In Watching the Perseids, poet Jed Myers chronicles the decline and death of his elderly father from a brain tumor. Memory, language, emotional control, all are eventually surrendered. Somehow, this is not a grim collection—it’s a book of gratitude and a remarkable meditation on an admirable, gifted man shaped by his century and its sometimes tragic confinements, his heritage, his marriage, his dutiful nature; it’s a deeply affecting book of love between father and son; and it’s a thrilling love song to memory itself. Jed Myers undertakes the most difficult of subjects with compassion, clarity, restraint, and great beauty.” — Kathleen Flenniken, author of Plume and 2012-14 Washington State Poet Laureate
Jed has also written a chap-book of poems:
The Nameless, a chapbook from Finishing Line Press.
“Jed Myers writes shatterproof poems. They are windows onto a world where the largest shapes are often dark, but his dazzling language and images never fail to deliver illumination. These poems have a beauty that will make you shiver.” — James Bertolino, author of Every Wound Has A Rhythm and Ravenous Bliss: New and Selected Love Poems