JTM

Jason Taylor Morgan is a literary novelist whose work is distinguished by intimate first-person narration, visual prose, and psychologically rich characters.

Jason Taylor Morgan 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.

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, freelance writing and editing, guest lecturing at Harrow College of Art and Technology, and absorbing experiences and synchronicities that continue to influence his work and imagination.

In the years since, his 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 grew in part from a five-year spiritual and personal road journey across the United States.

Jason writes exclusively in the first person, approaching each novel from inside a single consciousness and allowing the character's voice — not the author's — to shape the story. His novels explore the hidden emotional lives people carry beneath the surface and the moments when love, guilt, and hope demand an honest reckoning. Recurring themes of music, art, identity, transformation, and redemption emerge through character rather than plot.

Born in Boston in 1955, Jason began writing stories at age eleven. Several of his novels are set in the American South, inspired by his mother's stories of her Virginia upbringing. His work often blends literary fiction with magical realism and spiritual or musical undercurrents.

He published his sixth and seventh novels in 2026. Souls on Fire and Lonesome Dreams — The Autobiographies of "Hazel and Erie," America's Beloved Bluegrass Lesbians was eight years in the making. Angel Blood was written over two.

Jason lives, writes, and paints in Cloverdale, a small arts-focused town in Northern Sonoma County, California, where he is Resident Artist and Gallery Director Emeritus at the Cloverdale Arts Alliance Gallery. His later-in-life discovery of abstract painting became a natural extension of the visual imagination that has always informed his fiction. Working spontaneously in acrylic, he has shown in twenty-two exhibitions, exploring color, form, and movement in a creative language entirely different from words.

He remains drawn to what has interested him since he began writing as a child: the inner lives of people, the stories they carry, and their journeys toward transformation and redemption.