{"id":37,"date":"2021-02-26T01:21:48","date_gmt":"2021-02-26T01:21:48","guid":{"rendered":"http:\/\/dev.mongopoet.com\/?page_id=37"},"modified":"2024-04-19T17:20:23","modified_gmt":"2024-04-19T17:20:23","slug":"bio","status":"publish","type":"page","link":"https:\/\/wessmongojolley.com\/home\/bio\/","title":{"rendered":"Bio"},"content":{"rendered":"\t\t
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Short Bio<\/h4>\t\t\t\t<\/div>\n\t\t\t\t<\/div>\n\t\t\t\t
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Wess Mongo Jolley is a Canadian\/American novelist, editor, poet and poetry promoter living in Montreal.\u00a0 He is Founder and Executive Director of the Performance Poetry Preservation Project<\/a>, and is most well known for hosting the IndieFeed Performance Poetry Channel<\/a> podcast for more than ten years.\u00a0<\/p>

His work has been nominated for the Pushcart Prize, and has appeared in journals such as Grain, The Malahat Review, Valparaiso Fiction Review, Off the Coast, PANK, The New Verse News, Danse Macabre, The Chamber Magazine, Apparition Literary Magazine, decomP, Dressing Room Poetry Journal, and in collections such as the Write Bloody Press book The Good Things About America.<\/p>

He describes his sprawling supernatural horror trilogy, The Last Handful of Clover,<\/em><\/strong><\/a> as \u201can epic meditation on aging, loss, and regret.\u201d The novels are available on Patreon<\/a>, Wattpad<\/a>, and as audiobooks through his podcast<\/a> and YouTube<\/a>.<\/p>

After a quarter century living on sixty acres in rural Vermont, Mongo now writes and freelance edits full time from a cubicle overlooking la Collection nationale<\/em> in le Grand Biblioth\u00e8que de Montr\u00e9al.<\/em>.\u00a0<\/p>

He can be contacted at mongo@wessmongojolley.com,<\/a> and through the form at the bottom of this page.<\/p>\t\t\t\t\t\t\t\t<\/div>\n\t\t\t\t<\/div>\n\t\t\t\t

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Long Bio<\/h4>\t\t\t\t<\/div>\n\t\t\t\t<\/div>\n\t\t\t\t
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Wess Mongo Jolley<\/strong> is a Canadian\/American author, editor, and poetry promoter, living in Montr\u00e9al.<\/p>

Born and raised in Utah, USA, Mongo grew up in Park City, a mining and ski town thirty minutes outside of Salt Lake City.\u00a0 He attended the University of Utah, majoring in Theater with an Acting Emphasis.<\/strong>\u00a0 During those early years he worked on a large number of short stories, as well as Peace Reach,<\/em><\/strong> an autobiographical novel about his months-long solo excursion into the northern Canadian wilderness in 1984.\u00a0 He also wrote voluminous journals during several years of adventuring in the wilderness areas of the West, as well as over 4,000 miles of solo bicycle touring.<\/p>

It wasn\u2019t until more than a decade later that Mongo discovered what would become one of his greatest passions: poetry and spoken word.\u00a0<\/p>

It all began with the poet Allen Ginsberg, whose work has fascinated Mongo since he was a young adult.\u00a0 In 1995, he created the tribute website\u00a0ginzy.com<\/strong>,<\/strong> which quickly grew to become the most respected and comprehensive source of information about Ginsberg on the internet. At the time of Ginsberg\u2019s death in 1997, major media sources selected the site as a primary resource for information on the poet, and Mongo became key in organizing readings across the country to celebrate Ginsberg\u2019s life. Ginzy.com was closed in 2001, as the rise of Google and other search engines made the clearinghouse nature of the site unnecessary.<\/p>

In 2006, Mongo founded the\u00a0IndieFeed Performance Poetry Channel<\/strong>, which featured the best spoken word artists in the slam and performance poetry field. \u00a0In the over ten years of podcasting that followed, IndieFeed featured over 600 poets and 1,600 episodes, with a total download count of over ten million episodes distributed.\u00a0 During these years, the show was consistently listed as one of the top three poetry podcasts in iTunes.\u00a0 The archive of the show is available at http:\/\/performancepoetry.indiefeed.com<\/a>.<\/p>

In 2010, Mongo founded the\u00a0Performance Poetry Preservation Project (P4)<\/strong>.\u00a0 This partnership between the poetry slam community and the academic world has ambitions to collect, preserve, protect, and provide access to the recorded history of the poetry slam movement.\u00a0 In 2017, P4 transferred its collection of many thousands of items and tens of thousands of performances to Dartmouth College\u2019s Rauner Special Collections Library, and the organization continues to expand and build upon that collection.\u00a0 The P4 website is at\u00a0http:\/\/poetrypreservation.org<\/a>, and the permanent P4 collection catalog is at\u00a0https:\/\/archives-manuscripts.dartmouth.edu\/repositories\/2\/resources\/3246<\/a>.<\/p>

In his non-literary life, Mongo is\u00a0a Certified Records Manager <\/strong>and an information management professional with over thirty-five years of experience in the field. For twenty-two of those years,\u00a0he was\u00a0the\u00a0Records Manager <\/strong>at Dartmouth College<\/strong> in Hanover, New Hampshire, where he also served for eighteen months as the Interim Manager of the Rauner Special Collections Library<\/strong>. In these two roles, he nurtured a keen interest and built extensive experience in historical preservation, information technology, data system design, and digital recordkeeping. At his retirement in 2015, Dartmouth granted him the title of Records Manager Emeritus<\/strong>.\u00a0<\/p>

In the early 90s, prior to his work at Dartmouth, Mongo spent a half-dozen years as a\u00a0Crisis Counselor <\/strong>and the Data Management Coordinator\u00a0<\/strong>for\u00a0the California Runaway Hotline<\/strong>\u00a0in Sacramento, California.\u00a0 During these years he also established a chapter of ACT\/UP<\/strong> (the direct-action AIDS activist group founded by Larry Kramer); created Bear Byte Data Management<\/strong> (a relational database consulting business); and for several years was the Layout and Design editor of the legendary Pagan journal Green Egg,<\/strong> edited by Diane Darling and Oberon Zell.\u00a0 The deep connection he had during those years with The Church of All Worlds, and their nature sanctuary, Annwfn, has heavily influenced much of his writing.<\/p>

Mongo\u2019s writing<\/strong> has been nominated for the Pushcart Prize, and has appeared in journals such as Grain, The Malahat Review, Valparaiso Fiction Review, Off the Coast, PANK, The New Verse News, Danse Macabre, The Chamber Magazine, Apparition Literary Magazine, decomP, Dressing Room Poetry Journal, and in collections such as the Write Bloody Press book The Good Things About America<\/em>. Audio versions of his poetry have been featured on the IndieFeed Performance Poetry Channel, and Cloudy Day Art. He has performed his work at many open mics across the country, including The Green Mill, The Bowery Poetry Club, The LouderArts Project, and the Nuyorican Poets Cafe.<\/p>

Since his retirement from Dartmouth College, Mongo has freelanced through WMJ Manuscript Services<\/strong> as a manuscript consultant, specializing in helping poets craft their best manuscript out of a collection of poems.\u00a0 He has worked with prominent authors including Cristin O\u2019Keefe Aptowicz, Shane Koyczan, Derrick Brown, Anis Mojgani, and Jack McCarthy, among many others.\u00a0 In more recent years, he has offered his consulting, copy-editing, and proofreading services to prose writers as well.<\/p>

Most recently, Mongo has completed and released his sprawling supernatural horror trilogy, The Last Handful of Clover.<\/em><\/strong><\/a> He describes the work as \u201can epic meditation on aging, loss, and regret.\u201d The novels are available on Patreon<\/a>, Wattpad<\/a>, and as audiobooks through his podcast<\/a> and YouTube<\/a>.<\/p>

Mongo characterizes himself as a polyamorous queer faerie pagan poet bear.<\/strong> After a quarter century living on sixty acres in rural Vermont, he now lives with two of his three partners, and writes full time from a cubicle overlooking la Collection nationale<\/em> in le Grand Biblioth\u00e8que de Montr\u00e9al.<\/em><\/p>

His website can be found at\u00a0http:\/\/wessmongojolley.com<\/a>, and you can reach him at mongo@wessmongojolley.com,<\/a> or by using the form below.<\/p>\t\t\t\t\t\t\t\t<\/div>\n\t\t\t\t<\/div>\n\t\t\t\t\t<\/div>\n\t\t<\/div>\n\t\t\t\t\t<\/div>\n\t\t<\/section>\n\t\t\t\t<\/div>\n\t\t","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"

Short Bio Wess Mongo Jolley is a Canadian\/American novelist, editor, poet and poetry promoter living in Montreal.\u00a0 He is Founder and Executive Director of the Performance Poetry Preservation Project, and is most well known for hosting the IndieFeed Performance Poetry Channel podcast for more than ten years.\u00a0 His work has been nominated for the Pushcart … <\/p>\n

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