Jeff Pearson is a graduate of the University of Idaho’s MFA Program and the author of the chapbooks, Location Services and Sick Bed. He is an advocate for people with mental illness and adult literacy. His work has been published by Fourth River, Noble / Gas Quarterly, Monkeybicycle, Otis Nebula, Heavy Feather Review, Cosmonauts Avenue, Salt Front, Open Minds Quarterly, Permafrost, Barrelhouse, Entropy, and Moon City Review. He is the poetry editor for 5×5 Lit Mag, and the Assistant Director of The Writing Center at University of Idaho. He tweets at @legoverleg.

He advocates for adult literacy and for people with mental illnesses and has been diagnosed with bipolar I disorder after being committed under state custody in 2010. Since then, he has risen above to become a college instructor, tutor, MFA holder, proud husband, peacemaker, and advocate. His family are devout Mormons even though he no longer practices, and this experience informs his writing. His first manuscript has achieved as a finalist and semi-finalist for many book prizes.

CONTACT: legoverleg@gmail.com

About his chapbook, Location Services:

Brimming with nervy energy, these poems spotlight systems we believe to be coherent, and offer us a glimpse of what’s missing. They chart a mental health crisis through a rental history, run an elegy through google maps. The poems often begin bound—sometimes burdened—by place, but manage to transcend physical location: “Forget about drying off/with the towel from the flooded toilet.//Forget about dead relatives.// Forget all around you.// Forgive all around you.” The real service of Location Services is that Pearson navigates us toward a new understanding.

–Bethany Schultz-Hurst, author of Miss Lost Nation

From “the closest place to the middle of nowhere,” Jeff Pearson creates deeply imagined and uncommon somewheres: charting loss, breakdowns, and human connections with a vision like no one else. In a landscape ravined by deaths and charted by Google Street View, these poems and their “tones of unlikeliness” are restlessly questioning and unforgettable relocations.

–Alexandra Teague, author of The Wise and Foolish Builders, and The Mortal Geography.