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Jay Ponteri

Jay Ponteri directed the creative writing program at Marylhurst University from 2008-2018 and is now the program head of PNCA’s Low-Residency Creative Writing program. His book of creative nonfiction Someone Told Me was published by Widow+Orphan House, 2021. He’s also the author of Darkmouth Inside Me (Future Tense Books, 2014) and Wedlocked (Hawthorne Books, 2013), which received an Oregon Book Award for Creative Nonfiction. Two of Ponteri’s essays, “Listen to this” and “On Navel Gazing” have earned “Notable Mentions” in Best American Essay Anthologies. His work has also appeared in many literary journals: Gaze, Ghost Proposal, Eye-Rhyme, Seattle Review, Forklift, Ohio, Knee-Jerk, Cimarron Review, Tin House, Clackamas Literary Review, While teaching at Marylhurst, Ponteri was twice awarded the Excellence in Teaching & Service Award. In 2007, Ponteri founded Show:Tell, The Workshop for Teen Artist and Writers, now part of summer programming at Portland's Independent Publishing Resource Center (IPRC.org) on whose Resource Council he serves. He lives in Portland, Oregon. Headshot courtesy of Alice Duffy.
Jay Ponteri standing against a white wall.

Jay Ponteri, On The Year My Entire World Turned Upside Down

In the fall of 1989, I moved away from my childhood home in Mishawaka, Indiana, to Milwaukee, Wisconsin. I moved from a small town with very few people of color to a very diverse, albeit segregated, inner city.

Photo of a diner from outside an exterior window.

Fragments from 1989

In 1989, I would have been typing on a computer made by Apple. An Apple Macintosh. I just looked up a photo of this computer on Google.