Jameson Currier
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Jameson Currier is an American novelist, short story writer, poet, critic, journalist, editor, and publisher.
Jameson Currier was born on October 16, 1955, in Marietta, Georgia and graduated from Emory University in Atlanta with a B.A. degree in English, where he had been an active participant in music and theater groups. He moved to New York City in 1978 to begin graduate study in Dramatic Literature at New York University, but dropped out of the program to work for an entertainment publicity firm that handled theater accounts. Currier's first short stories centered on the comic adventures of a group of nomadic performers that were based on his friends. The subject and theme of his short stories changed as many of these friends became early casualties of the AIDS epidemic.[1] Writer David B. Feinberg brought Currier’s AIDS stories to the attention of Edward Iwanicki, an editor at Viking who published many gay male writers. Currier and Feinberg were members of a gay writers workshop in Manhattan in the mid-1980s and Iwanicki had edited and published Feinberg’s first novel, Eighty-Sixed (1989).[2] Currier’s first published collection of short stories, Dancing on the Moon: Short Stories About AIDS (1993), focused on the impact of AIDS on the families, friends, and partners of gay men who were facing the disease.
In the early 1990s Currier contributed unbylined book reviews to trade magazine Publishers Weekly, which led to bylined reviewing assignments of gay-themed books for local and national gay and mainstream publications. He was a member of the National Book Critics Circle from 1994-2000. Significant reviews include The Violet Quill Reader (1994), edited by David Bergman, for the Los Angeles Times[3], and Michael Cunningham's novel The Hours (1998) for The Washington Post.[4] From 1993 to 1996, Currier wrote features, articles, and interviews for Body Positive, a monthly magazine for the HIV-positive community, and he authored the screenplay for the documentary film Living Proof: HIV and the Pursuit of Happiness (1994), based on the studio portraits of HIV-positive people by photographer Carolyn Jones.
In 1998, Currier published his debut novel Where the Rainbow Ends, about a young gay man from the South who arrives to Manhattan in the late 1970s and falls in with a group of artistic friends, who are pulled apart and pieced together by the unexpected challenges of the AIDS epidemic.
Currier continued to write short stories on AIDS issues and gay male relationships, several of which were first published in new Internet ventures such as Blithe House Quarterly and Velvet Mafia. His second book of short fiction, Desire, Lust, Passion, Sex (2004), collected many of these stories.
Currier continued to work as a literary critic and journalist, including a stint in the late 1990s as an editor of the gay Manhattan weekly newspaper, The New York Blade, where he reported on the behind-the-scenes story of the Stonewall Inn being named to the National Register of Historic Places.[5] Post 9/11 Currier continued to live in Manhattan. Among the work he authored during this time was A Gathering Storm, a novel inspired by the gay beating of Matthew Shepard, which remained unpublished until 2014.
From 2001 to 2010, Currier reported on news items of interest to the LGBTQ publishing community, first in a column for the print journal Lambda Book Review, then in QueerType, his monthly Internet blog.
Currier also worked directly with Ann-Laure Hubert, a Belgian college student whose masters thesis had been a French translation of Dancing on the Moon, on a new translation of his AIDS stories, which was published in France as Les Fantômes (2005), in cooperation with sida, Grande Cause Nationale 2005, a national French AIDS organization.
In 2008, Currier collected three decades worth of his short fiction about the impact of AIDS on the lives of gay men in Still Dancing: New and Selected Stories, which was published by Lethe Press, a small press begun by author Steve Berman.
The following year, Currier’s gay-themed ghost stories were published in The Haunted Heart and Other Tales. These stories were begun post 9/11, when many of Currier’s journalism and book reviewing outlets diminished due to cutbacks.[6] The stories depict contemporary issues of the gay community in a supernatural setting. Included in the collection was “The Bloomsbury Nudes,” a short story that revolves around the Duncan Grant and Aleister Crowley and which was first published in the Stoker award-winning anthology Unspeakable Horror: From the Shadows of the Closet, edited by Vince A. Liaguno and Chad Helder.
In 2010, Currier established Chelsea Station Editions, an independent press devoted to gay literature, and served as the publisher, editor, and designer. The first book the press published was The Wolf at the Door, Currier’s tale of a haunted gay-owned guesthouse in New Orleans. That year the press also published Bob the Book, a novel by David Pratt, which Currier had read as judge for a literary competition and had remained unpublished. The novel went on to win a Lambda Literary award the following year for Gay Debut Fiction.
In 2011, Chelsea Station Edition published books by Felice Picano; Jon Marans, Michael Graves, Craig Moreau, Charles Silverstein, and Wesley Gibson, along with Currier’s third novel, The Third Buddha, that explores the effects of the World Trade Center attacks on a group of gay men and which is partially set in Afghanistan.
In the fall of 2011, Currier launched Chelsea Station magazine, a journal devoted to gay literature that published sporadically until he re-launched the magazine in 2014 as a Web journal.
Over the course of the next three years Chelsea Station Editions issued debut books written by Jeffrey Luscombe, J.R. Greenwell, William Sterling Walker, Gil Cole, and Dan Lopez. The press became home to Currier’s previously published work through reprint editions as well as for his new work, including What Comes Around (2012), a novel of linked stories written in the second person point of view, The Forever Marathon (2013), A Gathering Storm, and Until My Heart Stops (2014), a collection of nonfiction essays and memoirs, including those detailing his medical diagnosis of hypertrophic cardiomyopathy.
Currier is a member of the Horror Writers Association and the board of directors of the Arch and Bruce Brown Foundation.
As Author
Dancing on the Moon: Short Stories About AIDS (1993)
Living Proof: HIV and the Pursuit of Happiness (1994)
Where the Rainbow Ends (1998)
Desire, Lust, Passion, Sex (2004)
Les Fantômes (2005)
Still Dancing: New and Selected Stories (2008)
The Haunted Heart and Other Tales (2009)
The Wolf at the Door (2010)
The Third Buddha (2011)
What Comes Around (2012)
The Forever Marathon (2013)
A Gathering Storm (2014)
Until My Heart Stops (2014)
As Editor
Chelsea Station Magazine
Between: New Gay Poetry (2013)
With: New Gay Poetry (2013)
As Publisher
Circuit by Walter Holland (2010)
Bob the Book by David Pratt (2010)
True Stories: Portraits from My Past by Felice Picano (2011)
The Temperamentals by Jon Marans (2011)
The March by Walter Holland (2011)
Chelsea Boy by Craig Moreau (2011)
The Gay Man’s Guide to Timeless Manners and Proper Etiquette by Corey Rosenberg (2011)
Dirty One by Michael Graves (2011)
Personal Saviors by Wesley Gibson (2011)
For the Ferryman by Charles Silverstein (2011)
My Movie by David Pratt (2012)
Shirts and Skins by Jeffrey Luscombe (2012)
Desire: Tales of New Orleans by William Sterling Walker (2012)
A Strange and Separate People by Jon Marans (2012)
Pacific Rimming by Tom Cardamone (2013)
Fortune’s Bastard by Gil Cole (2013)
Love, Christopher Street edited by Thomas Keith (2013)
Who the Hell is Rachel Wells? By J.R. Greenwell (2013)
Part the Hawser, Limn the Sea by Dan Lopez (2014)
True Stories Too: People and Places from My Past by Felice Picano(2014)
After Lunch with Frank O’Hara by Craig Cotter (2014)
External links
- Jameson Currier website
- Chelsea Station Editions website
- Chelsea Station Magazine website
- Over the Haunted Rainbow: A Conversation with Jameson Currier, Dark Scribe Magazine
- Jameson Currier: Round and Round, interview by Michael Graves, Lambda Literary
References
- ^ Currier, Jameson, "Rock Hudson’s Vacation", 'Joy Exhaustible: Assaracus, Issue 14', Sibling Rivalry Press, March, 2014
- ^ Currier, Jameson, "Funny Guy”, 'Body Positive, December, 1994
- ^ Currier, Jameson, "No Shrinking Violets", Los Angeles Times Book Review, May 1, 1994
- ^ Currier, Jameson, "Three Faces of Mrs. Dalloway", Washington Post, November 22, 1998
- ^ Currier, Jameson, "Stonewall Wins Place in History", New York Blade, November 22, 1998
- ^ Liaguno, Vince A., "Over the Haunted Rainbow: A Conversation with Jameson Currier", 'Dark Scribe , February 28, 2010
Category:20th-century American novelists Category:21st-century American novelists Category:American male novelists Category:LGBT writers from the United States Category:Living people Category:American book editors Category:American short story writers Category:American magazine editors Category:Male short story writers Category:Gay writers Category:LGBT novelists Category:Emory University alumni