In(ter)ventions: Literary Practice at the Edge

Joe Amato – poet, poetic theorist, institutional critic and pseudo-scholar, novelist, memoirist, essayist, aspiring screenwriter, novice playwright, occasional editor and sometime digital practitioner – was born and raised in Syracuse, NY, the snowiest metro area in the US. A licensed professional engineer in New York State, he spent seven years in industry working in various project engineering capacities before turning from the art of numbers to the art of letters. Amato is the author of nine books: Samuel Taylor’s Last Night (novel, forthcoming); Big Man with a Shovel (novel); Once an Engineer: A Song of the Salt City (memoir); Pain Plus Thyme (poetry); Industrial Poetics: Demo Tracks for a Mobile Culture (criticism); Under Virga (poetry); Finger Exorcised (poetry); Bookend: Anatomies of a Virtual Self (criticism); and Symptoms of a Finer Age (poetry). His essays, poetry and digital art have been published in a wide range of journals in the US and abroad. Yellow Medicine, coauthored with Kass Fleisher, advanced to the semifinal round of the Nicholl Fellowship screenplay competition, hosted by the Academy of Motion Picture Arts and Sciences, while placing in the second round of the Austin Film Festival. Another screenplay, Bear River (also with Fleisher), advanced to the semifinal round of the Chesterfield Writer’s Film Project fellowship competition, hosted by Paramount Pictures. Amato and Fleisher have recently adapted Big Man with a Shovel for the screen, and completed their first play, Fat Jack’s, and a new screenplay, The Adjunct. Amato divides his time between the heart of the Heart of Illinois – where, mercifully, it doesn't snow all that much – and Boulder, CO, where he hikes, drinks, and socializes while lamenting the receding glaciers and the once and future recession.