JTM

Jason Taylor Morgan — author of seven novels — is a novelist whose work is rooted in voice, visual prose, emotional depth, human transformation, and a lifelong search for truth.

His fiction explores characters on the edge of transformation—often navigating trauma, love, identity, and the long arc of redemption. Across his novels, recurring themes of music, memory, healing, and the hidden emotional lives people carry beneath the surface run quietly through the work. A first-person novelist, Jason approaches his characters immersively, entering their emotional worlds from the inside out.

Born in Boston in 1955, Jason began writing stories at age eleven. He studied literature and writing at Bard College, where he was mentored by novelist and National Book Award winner Mary Lee Settle. Her belief that every great story begins with the soul of a character continues to shape his work today.

Though a Northerner, several of Jason’s novels are set in the American South—settings inspired by his mother’s stories of her Virginia upbringing, full of beauty, repression, moral conflict, and emotional complexity. His work often blends literary fiction with elements of magical realism, psychological depth, and spiritual or musical undercurrents.

At twenty-three, he left the United States with a one-way ticket to Europe and no plan other than to write and live passionately. He spent two years in London and Paris—writing his first novel, guest lecturing at Harrow College of Art and Technology, traveling, and absorbing experiences and synchronicities that continue to influence his work and imagination.

Over the years, Jason’s path has moved through many worlds: senior marketing and public relations executive, counselor for at-risk youth in a children's psychiatric hospital, and teacher of consciousness and emotional healing. His novel O'Rourke, the Medicine Man was inspired by a five-year spiritual and personal road journey across the United States.

Today Jason lives, writes, and paints in Cloverdale, a small arts-focused town in Northern Sonoma County, California. His most recent novel, Souls on Fire and Lonesome Dreams — The Autobiographies of “Hazel and Erie” — America’s Beloved Bluegrass Lesbians, was published in 2026. His seventh novel, Angel Blood, is nearing completion.

His later-in-life discovery of abstract painting became a natural extension of that same creative impulse—a second language through which to explore emotion, mystery, and human experience.

At seventy-one, he remains devoted to creative expression in its most honest and soul-baring forms—and to the mystery and meaning found in telling redemptive and liberating stories, whether through words or acrylic paint.