Resume

• 2010

  Jerry

  Mathes

  Stephen F. Austin State University

  PEN America

  Orion

  Author

  Screenwriter

  Photographer.

  Raytheon Polar Services

  Worked in logistics at Amundsen-Scott South Pole Station

  Antarctica. I also taught the World's Southernmost Writers Workshop in the World. I volunteered on the emergency response team and made two short films for the South Pole International Film Festival.

  Raytheon Polar Services

  PEN America Writing for Justice Fellow

  PEN America

  Visiting assistant professor of creative writing nonfiction.

  Stephen F. Austin State University

  Book Critic at Orion:People and Nature

  Reviews books that match the magazine's mission to explore the relationship of people to the environment.

  Orion

  Writer

  PUBLICATIONS \n\nBOOKS:\n Shipwrecks and Other Stories. Nacogdoches

  TX: Stephen F. Austin State University Press

  2017. Awarded Honorable Mention Los Angeles Book Festival. \n\n Fever and Guts: A Symphony. Nacogdoches

  TX: Stephen F. Austin State University Press

  2013 \n\n Ahead of the Flaming Front: A Life on Fire. Caldwell

  ID: Caxton Press

  2013. Awarded the North American Book Prize for Memoir. \n\n The Journal West: Poems. Lewiston

  ID: Lewis-Clark Press

  2009. \n\nCHAPBOOKS: \n Fall in the Borderland. Georgetown

  KY: Finishing Line Press

  2008. Finalist in Finishing Line Press chapbook competition. \n\n Twelve Lovers

  Lost and Found. Lewiston

  ID: Talking River Press

  2004. Winner of the Talking River Chapbook Prize. \n\n FILM: \n “Slay the Dragon.” Video Essay. SpacesLitMag. (2012). \n\n “Drinking Sangria in the Cold War.” Producer

  Unit Production Manager

  Fight Choreographer

  and Script Writer. Premiered Stephen F. Austin State University Auditorium. (2011). \n\n “Mad Maxine.” Producer

  Script Writer

  Director

  and Editor. Premiered in the South Pole International Film Festival. (2012). \n\n “The Heroic Age of Antarctic Exploration.” Director

  Narrator

  and Editor. Premiered in the South Pole International Film Festival. (2012). \n\nPHOTOGRAPHY: \n After the Rain. San Pedro River Review. (2019). \n Lost Railroad. San Pedro River Review. (2019). \n Contributing Photographer to Enerpo News. (2014-Present). \n Photo Independent Los Angeles. (2016). \n\nA full list of literary publications and awards available upon request.

  Author

  Screenwriter

  Photographer.

  Jack Kent Cooke Scholars Alumni Association

  National Book Critics Circle

  Mission Statement: The National Book Critics Circle honors outstanding writing and fosters a national conversation about reading

  criticism

  and literature. http://bookcritics.org/about/

  Voting Member (freelance)

• 2005

  MFA

  Creative Writing Fiction

  Jack Kent Cooke Scholar

  Intermountain Graduate Student Association

  Western Literature Association

  Pacific Northwest American Studies Association

  University of Idaho

• 2001

  BA

  English

  Lewis-Clark State College

• 2000

  Literary essays and fiction and musings on the writer's life.

  Mathes

• Jerry Mathes (@jdmathes) * Instagram photos and videos

  Award winning author

  photographer

  and dad.

  On Fire

  A video essay excerpted from my memoir

  Ahead of the Flaming Front: A Life on Fire. It originally appeared at Writers Read in SpaceLitMag as \"Slay the Dragon...

  On Fire

  Blog

  Jerry D. Mathes II | Narrative Magazine

  Jerry D. Mathes II is the author of the chapbook Fall in the Borderland and a poetry collection

  The Journal West. He received Special Mentions for Fiction i...

  Jerry D. Mathes II | Narrative Magazine

  JDMathes.photo

  Photography projects I am working on.

  Literature

  Publications

  Non-fiction

  Editing

  Feature Articles

  Blogging

  Writing

  Creative Non-fiction

  Publishing

  Poetry

  Screenwriting

  Books

  Creative Writing

  Logistics

  Proofreading

  Freelance Writing

  Teaching

  Fiction

  History

  Copy Editing

  Ahead of the Flaming Front: A Life on Fire

  Ahead of the Flaming Front: A Life on Fire

  Shipwrecks and Other Stories

  n Shipwrecks and Other Stories we read of men and women struggling in love and longing

  adultery and addiction

  between staying in a place and moving on

  while trying to rediscover who they are. Readers search the desert for a beloved mule with the grandson of a hard rock miner. We go for a swim with an obese woman who finds courage by breaking into a closed public pool. We are abandoned with an exiled Guatemalan Special Forces Major and his family on the US-Mexico border when he discovers smugglers trafficking kidnapped girls and faces the decision to attempt to rescue the girls or ignore them and not risk his family’s safety. We stand in a rainy night with a commercial fisherman

  still reeling from an accident at sea

  as he finds hope in the skeleton of a ship that will never float. A hunter tracks the mountains for a wounded elk as he comes to terms with economic changes and having to leave the place he grew up. Two women confront each other about the affairs they had with each other’s husbands. In the Meadow Award winning novella

  “Still Life

  ” a paramedic spirals into the Las Vegas drug underworld after accidentally killing a girl

  but still struggles to do something good. These and other characters haunt the fringes of their own lives shipwrecked in society as they seek identity

  hoping to rescue themselves.

  Shipwrecks and Other Stories

  Jerry Mathes's poems come not from concepts

  but from his life

  first his experiences working on an Alaskan fishing boat in the Bering Sea

  later as a firefighter in forests of the northwest. Many of these poems are georgics of a sort

  not so much about nature itself

  but about hard work in the elements. Mathes is good at rendering the physical world and makes it appeal to all of our senses. Whether about blown engines

  fringe towns that have known better days

  wolves

  horses

  boatyards

  timber mills

  or his beloved daughters

  these poems quickly arrest attention with trustworthy language backed by a coherent sensibility that transmits experience made familiar and compelling. The Journal West

  Mathes's debut volume

  is an impressive one - Peter Makuck. Jerry Mathes writes with hard-won intimacy about emotional and physical survival in a landscape that is both natural and unnatural

  blessed and doomed. Quietly muscular

  beautifully imagined

  these poems take us deep to the heart of a world that is often harrowing yet always defined by the redeeming rituals of human connection - Kim Barnes

  author of A Country Called Home.

  The Journal West: Poems

  Jerry D. Mathes’ Fever and Guts is hard-hitting literary nonfiction. Reminiscent of the exacting sharpness found in Hemingway’s bullfighting stories and as deeply reflective as Tim O’Brien’s The Things They Carried

  Mathes takes his readers to the fringes of American society

  a subculture where war stories are handed down from fathers to sons and then are lived by those sons; where fathers brace against the weather of daughters’ illnesses; where language and speech is music

  poetry

  and violence. Mathes journeys us to the mountains of Idaho

  the deserts of the Southwest and of Desert Storm

  the icy plains of Antarctica

  and into the dark

  gloomy backrooms of bars and hotels. Amidst storms and forests ablaze

  he makes us feel the thunder’s rumble

  the smoke settled in our lungs. Although Mathes puts us into proximity of things most of us have been lucky to escape

  he makes such existences seem amazingly and beautifully normal

  makes it seem as if we have missed out. In this manner

  Mathes turns his personal histories into works of mad

  provocative art

  so skillfully and innovatively turned that the reader will not let the stories go and

  in the aftermath of reading

  not turn them loose from memory. This is nonfiction of the best sort

  real and ballsy as a life lived real and with bravado.

  Fever and Guts: A Symphony

  Literary Fiction