A native New Yorker who has lived in Virginia, Minnesota, and most of the past thirty years in Los Angeles, A. Jay Adler earned his M.A. and M. Phil degrees in English literature at Columbia University. After twenty  years tenured in Los Angeles, Adler returned to live part time in New York City, where he taught at Fordham University and Queens College, CUNY.

The grandson and son of working-class Jewish immigrants from Ukraine, Adler grew up in the Queens, New York of Eisenhower’s America, relished and survived the Sixties, and came of age in the edgy, dystopian New York City of the 1970s. Along the way, he shocked no one more than himself by becoming successful in business. At a height of his success, feeling that existential inauthenticity of which critical life choices are made, Adler gave it up to refocus on his love of literature and writing. Since then, Adler has written plays and competition-awarded screenplays, published poetry, fiction, creative and other nonfiction, including memoir and film criticism, and written cultural and political analysis for a variety of online journals. A collection of some of the creative work was featured in Alternating Current Press’s 2015 premier issue of Footnote, a Literary Journal of History. Adler was also awarded a residency grant in poetry at the Vermont Studio Center, For nearly a decade, Adler blogged regularly at “the sad red earth” (Sal Paradise in On the Road). In 2006, he and his life partner, documentary photographer Julia Dean, drove the length of Route 66 for its 80th anniversary. Dean’s photography, shot with a 4X5 pinhole camera, and Adler’s exploration of the national mythos of Westward travel then appeared as “The American Road: Route 66 at 80” in the final issue of Robert Coles’ Doubletake magazine.

Adler’s most recent publications are “Hemingway in the Twenty-First Century,” appearing in the fall 2022 issue of The Hong Kong Review and the poem “The Hard-skinned Fruit,” in the spring 2023 California Quarterly. In 2021 his first collection of poetry, Waiting for Word, was published by Finishing Line Press. Also that year, his writing on Native America, to accompany Dean’s images, appeared in the summer 2021 issue, “Americans,” of ProgressivE-Zine. Adler is currently at work on The Dream of Don Juan de Cartagena, a novel of the Magellan expedition.

Email: AJayAdlerWriter@outlook.com

*The running lines of poetry on the homepage chyron come from Conrad Aiken’s “Tetelestai.”

*The lines in the Homo Vitruvious description close the penultimate stanza of W. H. Auden’s “In Memory of W. B. Yeats.