Leland Jamieson

Leland Jamieson lives and writes in East Hampton, CT, USA. A Phi Beta Kappa graduate of UNC at Chapel Hill, he brings to his poetry a wide variety of landscapes acquired living in Florida, North Carolina, Massachusetts, Rhode Island, and Connecticut.

His poetry is colored by the outlooks of people he's met in four different occupations. The longest and most interesting of these, he says, was in performing arts center management at The Bushnell Memorial Hall in Hartford, Connecticut, where he worked for 18 years and wore every hat there was to wear, including that of the managing director.

Although he has been a scribbler of verse since he was a teen, starting in 2002 he began to devote himself to formal poetry. His goal is to use rhyme and meter to tell stories and present vignettes relevant to today’s readers in a way they can readily grasp, and be grasped by, on multiple levels.

Among his major influences are the dramatic works of William Shakespeare and the poetry of Walt Whitman, Robert Frost, William Carlos Williams, and Wallace Stevens, as well as both the prose and poetry of William Stafford and Timothy Steele.

"Teaching myself to write in meter and especially rhyme, and committing myself to it," he says, "has been the most liberating experience I have ever enjoyed in my writing life. What they most liberated was feeling and creativity, and with it fresh insight into people, and into the nature of the world we call home."