Joel Weishaus

I was born in New York. At age 19 was Assistant Traffic Manager for a Madison Avenue advertising agency. In 1964, I moved to Berkeley, CA,  where I was a student in the University of California, Department of Oriental Languages and Literary Editor of the student newspaper. In 1971, I edited On The Mesa: An Anthology of Bolinas Writing, (City Lights Books). That year, too, Cranium Press published my translations: Oxherding: A Reworking of the Zen Text, with Woodcuts by Arthur Okamura. In 1977, I moved to Santa Fe, NM. That year I received a grant from the Mary Roberts Reinhart Foundation, and a 9-month writing residency at the Helene Wurlitzer Foundation, Taos, NM.
During the early 1980s, I spent four years sculpting and studying post-structuralist theories. In 1984, I became a features writer for Artspace: A Quarterly of Contemporary Southwest Art. In 1985, I was appointed Adjunct Curator of Video Art at the University of New Mexico’s Museum of Fine Arts, in Albuquerque.
In 1991, my forty texts for a project with photographer Patrick Nagatani, The Nuclear Enchantment of New Mexico, were exhibited by the Albuquerque Museum, for which I was awarded a grant from the Witter Bynner Foundation for Poetry. The next year, the Stanford University Museum of Art had the exhibion, my prose poems now titled The Deeds and Sufferings of Light, and in Fall 2010, 12 of the text were on exhibit at the University of New Mexico Art Museum as part of the “Desire for Magic” exhibition.
From 1998 until 2000, I was a writer-in-residence at the University of New Mexico's Center for Southwest Research.
I moved to Portland, OR in 2000, where for seven years I was Research Faculty in the Department of English, Portland State University,developing Digital Literary Art projects.
I presently live ihn Ojai, CA with my wife, Dr. Susan Rowland.
My on-line work is archived at Virginia Polytechnic Institute’s Center for Digital Discourse and Culture: http://www.cddc.vt.edu/host/weishaus/index.html
Address: Ojai, CA