Jesse Michaels

Jesse Michaels is an author, artist and musician from Berkeley California. In the 1980s, Michaels was very active in the Bay Area punk scene and was the lead singer for bands including Operation Ivy, Common Rider and Classics of Love. As a visual artist he created designs for bands including Neurosis, Christ on Parade, Filth, Green Day and Operation Ivy. Much of his visual art became iconic and can still be found on tee-shirts and back patches around the world. In 2000 he began writing fiction, a process inspired by avid reading as a child and a desire to create work that could extend beyond the limits of music while still retaining a core aesthetic of nonconformity and social critique. This practice resulted in Michaels's debut novel in 2013, "Whispering Bodies." Whispering Bodies was critically well received, winning good notes from authors including Pat Dewitt and the California poet Alex Green, among others. Dark, hilarious, paranoid and absurd, Whispering Bodies marked Michaels as a distinctive literary voice rooted in the broad tradition of authors interested in psychological fringes, such as Fanté, Bukowski, Gaitskill and Toole. Michaels holds a BA in literary studies from UCLA and currently lives in Los Angeles where he is working on his second novel, painting, and making micro-budget movies.