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"[Hearing Jason Pettus perform] is like you've stepped into a John Hughes movie and there's Duckie, standing right in front of you. Well, Duckie with a beer, a cigarette and a stiffy." --NewCity (Chicago)

For most of his life, Jason Pettus has been involved with the arts in one way or another; he has been playing classical piano since the age of eight, won the Louis Armstrong Award for jazz excellence in 1986 (for his improvisational trumpet work), and is trained not only as a professional clown and juggler but also puppeteer. Ironically, Pettus' first serious career choice was as a computer programmer, and throughout the 1980s he taught himself a variety of languages that no longer have any practical value, such as FORTRAN, BASIC and PASCAL.

In 1986, spurred by an enthusiastic reading of The Paper Chase, Pettus entered the University of Missouri as a political-science major, a course of study he would pursue for the next four years. In the meanwhile he became active with music on the college level, performing in Mizzou's marching, jazz, concert and women's-basketball pep bands and joining the professional music service fraternity Kappa Kappa Psi. He was also a founding member of the Mid-Missouri Science Fiction Association, and helped bring Marian Zimmer Bradley to his campus in 1987.

In 1990, disillusioned with the business of politics, Pettus switched his major to fine-art photography. It was at this point that his adult career in the arts started; over the next four years he would mount five exhibitions of his work, including a solo show that broke the all-time Mizzou attendance record for an on-campus undergraduate exhibition. Pettus immersed himself deeply in the arts in the early 90s, participating in as many projects as people gave him the chance to pursue: he was the head of jazz programming for KCOU, the campus student-owned radio station, as well as an on-air personality; he created a comic strip called "Power Ties: Cartoon Tales for a Cartoon Culture" for The Maneater, Mizzou's student newspaper, which was voted "Favorite Strip" by its readers in 1993; he was a founding member of "American Scream," a comedy improvisation troupe; he studied performance art under noted Picasso scholar Dr. Karen Kleinfelder and mounted three experimental interactive plays; he hosted a poetry open mic for Stir, the University of Missouri literary magazine; and he was the founder of GALLERIA, a student-run art gallery that became a local phenomenon in 1990. (Over the course of seven exhibitions, GALLERIA garnered a total audience of over 2,000 people and generated over a dozen articles in the local press; it also received the largest non-athletic grant of any student organization for the 1991 school year.)

In 1994, Pettus moved to Chicago to pursue a professional career as a fine-art photographer. Unfortunately he found the flavor of the Chicago arts community not to his taste; fortunately, he happened to meet a group of people at the same time who convinced him to attempt writing a novel. In 1996 he finished the novel, entitled Dreaming of Laura Ingalls; it was published by GAD in 1997 to some acclaim, selling out of its print run in less than a year. Pettus has gone on to write another seven novels and counting, including 1998's interactive Creamed Corn, published online with a grant from the Illinois Arts Council. Creamed Corn was an official entrant in the 1999 AltX/trAce hyperfiction contest, has garnered special praise from the Electronic Literature Organization, and has been placed on the reading list of over two dozen college-level classes on experimental literature.

In 1996, spurred by the hope of meeting cute girls, Pettus first started getting involved with Chicago's performance poetry community. In 1997 he placed fourth at the finals of the Uptown Poetry Slam, hosted by Marc Smith, securing him a spot on the national team. That August the Chicago-Green Mill team placed second at the national competition, which is when Pettus' literary career started gaining speed: over the next six months he would perform for National Public Radio, the Chicago Museum of Contemporary Art, and WGN-TV. Over the years Pettus has racked up dozens of interesting performance credits, including appearances at the Albuquerque and Tempe poetry festivals, the legendary New York punk club CBGB's, the infamous Bearded Lady coffeehouse in San Francisco, as well as numerous regional tours. He has also worked on the administrative side of the slam community, coordinating all 25 daytime events at the 1999 national competition and regularly volunteering as a judge at the annual Chicago Teen Poetry Slam finals.

In 1998 Pettus started the first version of his personal website, which has grown over the years to now include over 1,200 pages of content. Within half a year of starting his site he received the Geocities Site of the Month award; other organizations who have taken note of his online work include Yahoo! Internet Life, Chicago Tribune, NewCity (Chicago), Artbyte, Hustler, Speech Therapy, Metafilter.com, Popgurls.com, Palmnerd.com, and the national daily newspaper of Finland. In 1999 he received a grant from the Illinois Arts Council and Chicago Department of Cultural Affairs for his work in hyperfiction, the first online writer to do so in that grant's history. In 2001 Pettus started making his daily online journal available to people with mobile devices, through a third-party company called AvantGo; the unique nature of this delivery system now nets him over 15,000 readers each day, and has generated numerous accolades from various emerging-technology organizations.

Over the years Pettus has regularly penned nonfiction articles for the alternative press; among other experiences, his essay "The Death of the Internet" (originally published in the Canadian pop-culture journal Kiss Machine) was cited for excellence by the 2001 Zine Yearbook. His current nonfiction project is a weekly sex column for the British lifestyle magazine Liv4now; the English don't quite know what to make of him, but seem to like the column anyway. He is the author of multiple scripts for film and theatre, most recently the romantic comedy/drama Sick, produced by Roxbox Films in spring 2003 and now available on DVD. He also owns his own publishing company, GAD, which has now published over 40 of his short books.

When not busy writing, Pettus enjoys staring directly at the sun, taking too much speed, obsessively watching The Empire Strikes Back, and desperately wondering when the hell he can finally stop having to hold crappy day jobs. You can reach him at ilikejason at hotmail dot com.