Jerry Williams's entire family, on both sides, originated from Harlan, Kentucky, a coal town in the southeastern part of the "Bluegrass State," a place of great importance to labor historians and country singers. His ancestry consists mostly of alcoholics and pill addicts, xenophobes, agoraphobes, preachers, toothless Felliniesque pinheads, veterans of foreign wars with unidentifiable diseases, attempted murderers, moonshiners and bootleggers, racists, golfers, magicians, disability royalty, suicides, freemasons, and a legion of mourners. Before he arrived on the scene, his mother and father and his two sisters moved north to Dayton, Ohio, birthplace of African-American poet Paul Lawrence Dunbar, actor Rob Lowe, and sibling aviators Orville and Wilbur Wright. Over the years, he has been an infant; a child; an adolescent; an adult; a gym rat; an undergraduate at Vermont College, where he received a B.A. in English; singer in a band named after a Sam Shepard play; landscaper; typist; bartender; delivery driver (auto parts); cashier; telephone solicitor; dishwasher; librarian's assistant; Los Angeleno; San Franciscan; Princetonian; Tucsonan (he earned an M.F.A. in Poetry at the University of Arizona); as well as a reluctant Stillwaterian, where he earned a Ph.D. in English with a creative dissertation at Oklahoma State University. After spending two years in Bristol, Rhode Island, as a Visiting Assistant Professor at Roger Williams University, he settled in New York City. Currently, he lives in the Bronx with his wife Shelby, and he is an Associate Professor of Creative Writing at Marymount Manhattan College. He has never visited Europe or Asia. Nor does he appreciate the Beatles, Bob Seger, or the Grateful Dead. Nor is he a true believer in the holy writ. He does, however, love children and most animals.