Jason Pettus has had a long, varied and interesting life in his now 30+ years in the professional arts. Raised in Missouri, and initially studying fine-art photography at the University of Missouri-Columbia, he moved to Chicago in 1994 where he randomly joined a workshop of people working on their first novels. He self-published his first book in 1997, the same year he made the Green Mill team that placed second at that year’s National Poetry Slam. The resulting notoriety from these two events gave him opportunities throughout the rest of the ‘90s and early ‘00s to appear in such venues as National Public Radio, the Canadian Broadcasting Channel, the Chicago Museum of Contemporary Art, the Chicago Tribune, Artbyte magazine, WGN-TV and more, all while being an enthusiastic contributor to ‘90s zine/chapbook culture and a reviewer for both the Quimby’s Magalog and Broken Pencil.

In 2007 Pettus stopped writing professionally in order to instead open and run the Chicago Center for Literature and Photography, or CCLaP. In its ten years of active existence, CCLaP published 40 books for collective distribution of 20,000 copies, and was either a winner or a finalist for half a dozen literary awards, including the Pushcart Prize, the Lambda Award for LGBTQ Literature, and the Independent Book Publishers Award. The center itself was also named one of the top ten indie presses in the United States by both BookRiot.com and Poets & Writers magazine.

2017 brought the newest turn in Pettus’ career, first to freelancing and then exclusively to book editing in 2020. Since early 2022 he has continuously held a Top Rated status at Upwork.com every month without a break, and an unprecedented success score still of 100% even after several hundred clients. He works in all genres and categories, but is particularly proud of the editing he’s done in the world of romance, crime, YA and science-fiction/fantasy authors who self-publish through Kindle Unlimited. He is a proud member of both the American Copy Editors Society and the Romance Writers of America, and is regularly recruited to be a judge in various romance literary contests throughout the year.

When not busy editing, Pettus also reads over 100 books per year just for fun (and reviews each and every one at them at Goodreads.com), as well as attending estate sales across Chicago in the hunt for rare books (some of which he sells at his eBay store). He is also doing an increasing amount of international travel, when he’s not in fellowship with his housemates at the Qumbya Bowers House co-op in Chicago’s Hyde Park neighborhood where he lives. He enjoys cooking, especially within the Mediterranean Diet, breadmaking, bicycling, juggling, and doing worldbuilding just for fun (but see his online project Progress City to learn more about that).