Board Member Jasper Ezekiel and his Good, Clean Mania

Our long-standing tradition of giving a member the mic before our keynote speaker helps us get to know what our colleagues are working on. Our 5+5+5 guidelines (5 minutes of backstory, 5 minutes to read, and 5 minutes of Q&A) help emerging writers polish their professional skills.

Jasper Ezekiel will take the Member Spotlight before our April speaker, Nazelah Jameson. Get tickets here.

Jasper Ezekiel is a queer poet and artist from the Bay Area. His confessional poetry is all about that growing up that happens while already grown.

Jasper Ezekiel has been writing his whole life and has completed three (as of yet) unpublished novels and hundreds of poems. He’s been published in Milvia Street, Pedestrian Press, and the Berkeley Times Poetry Edition. His first book of poetry, Good, Clean Mania, was published in 2023.

Find Jasper on Intsagram as @s8nicangel

Jasper has been training as our Speaker Chair in 2024-25. He says…

“I have loved my time in the CWC. I was honored to be nominated to be on the board as Speaker Chair and being able to see behind the curtains on how the Club works and what goes on behind the scenes has been an amazing way to engage in the Club for me. It’s been such a privilege to be doing my job for the CWC, with my Speaker Liaison Leena Prasad. The speaker series was always my favorite part of the CWC. The connections the club has are very impressive and I’ve never been to a speaker series that didn’t totally inspire me.”

Getting to Know Jasper Ezekiel

Where are you in your writing career? Aspiring? Published?

While I have published a book, I still feel very much like an aspiring writer. I see being a “writer” as something like enlightenment. Sure, some people achieve it in this lifetime, but personally it’s something I may be striving towards my whole life without actually reaching it. To be a writer for me is a mindset, a state of being only achieved in bursts at my keyboard, the other times I’m spent being a dreamer, a thinker, a lover, then writing about that experience.

What writers inspire you?

I am greatly inspired by writers who write about dark, taboo subjects, especially when romantic and queer. Exquisite Corpse by Poppy Z Brite is my favorite novel of all time and I aspire to achieve the disturbed and deeply romantic feeling of that book. Another is a classic, the Interview With the Vampire series by Anne Rice. I love her depictions of these messy relationships with high strung vampires coupled with beautiful, dense prose. A third author that deeply inspires me, that I would love to combine with the dark elements of Rice and Brite, is Ursula K Le Guin. I read A Wizard of Earthsea about 20 times while I was in college and that book was incredibly relevant to my journey. I think it would be fun to mix the horror elements of the other authors that inspire me with the Eastern philosophy and heartfelt empathy of Le Guin.

Meet Jasper at our April LIVE meeting at Joaquin Miller Park with Nazelah Jameson!

Get tickets now or find out more by clicking on the image below.