Jack Grapes

Jack Grapes is an award-winning poet, playwright, actor, teacher, editor and publisher. For 25 years he was editor and publisher of ONTHEBUS, a literary journal that has published the work of nearly a thousand poets and writers from all over the world. Library Journal declared that ONTHEBUS was "destined to be a major aftershock in American literary history." Jack has received several National Endowment for the Arts Fellowships in Literature, numerous NEA Publishing grants, and six grants from the California Arts Council to teach poetry in over 100 Southern California schools. He wrote and starred in Circle of Will, a metaphysical comedy about the lost years of William Shakespeare, which ran for several years in Hollywood and won theater critic awards for Best Comedy and Best Performance by an Actor. For the last 40 years, he has taught writing to over 3,000 poets and writers in his private classes, working from his two books Method Writing and Advanced Method Writing. Published in 2019 by Chatwin Press in Seattle, his Collected Poems: Last of the Outsiders included work from 24 previous collections of poetry written over the last 50 years. His most recent book is Wide Road to the Edge of the World, 301 haiku with an introductory essay, “A Windswept Spirit,” in 201 chapters and 601 paragraphs. Due for publication in 2021 are four non-fiction books: Etherized Upon a Table, a two-volume study on the history and evolution of modern poetries; How to Read Like a Writer, a study of the “six-ways writers write sentences”; The Tender Agonies of Charles Bukowski and Other Essays, covering the work of Marcel Proust, Anton Bruckner, Catullus, Bukowski, and the stylistic strategies of dozens of novelists and poets; and a study of James Joyce and his novel Ulysses, tentatively titled Yes I Said Yes I Will Yes. Jack is also working on a new book of poem, Exit Music.