Jerry James

Theatre Essayist

Jerry James has been an archery instructor, a door-to-door encyclopedia salesman, a truck driver, a secretary, a stagehand, a telemarketer and the company clerk of A-7-2, Ft. Jackson, SC, during the Late Unpleasantness in Southeast Asia. He once spent fourteen months traveling from Washington State to Valley Forge with a wagon train—and has been getting paid for his work in the theatre since 1965. He won the 2012 New York Musical Theatre Festival Award for Excellence in Writing-Book for A Letter to Harvey Milk. The musical later had a four-month run Off Broadway. Jerry is the author of fifteen plays, variously produced in New York and other US cities, Toronto, Munich and on tour in Great Britain. Two of these were commissioned by the National Library of Medicine. He is also a prize-winning author of short fiction. During the Nineties, he wrote The Life, a column for the alternative monthly, Voices, in which he chronicled the lives of those scruffling on the fringes of the New York theatre scene. Jerry has taught at Penn State, Fordham and Hofstra, where for five years he directed the Senior Showcase. Dramaturge: Woodstock Shakespeare Festival. Alumnus: BMI-Lehman Engel Musical Theatre Workshop.