About Jack

     My first writing began when I was about eight years old. My mother encouraged me to be creative and make projects for our local youth fair. One of the entries was for creative writing. The guidelines were to write a short story of up to ten double-spaced pages.

     I wrote a story for the fair every year until I was 21, too old to keep entering projects for the youth fair. Overlapping with this period, I started my years at college. I saw that the school offered a creative writing class and entered in. It was there that I was assigned to write poetry.

     My experience with poetry before this had not been small. I had to read poems for literature class. I didn't like poetry. I didn't understand it much and was bored by it. I wanted to read stories where something happened. I thought of poetry as something static.

     In high school, I participated in a reader's theater class. We did some skits and plays written for reader's theater. Sometimes the teacher had us recite poems, many of which were by Shel Silverstein. These poems were pretty silly, and a lot of fun. But besides Mr. Silverstein's work, I did not like poetry. Until I took a creative writing class in college.

     I did the assignment, but ran short on time and had to turn in the poem before it was finished. It had two stanzas, and then three lines of a third stanza. The next class period when the assignments were returned to us, the teacher only gave me some positive feedback. That was a big shift in thinking for me, and I began writing and doodling with poetry in my free time.

     For years, I knew that I wanted to write a novel some time. Then, in 2016, I finally decided that the project had waited long enough, and I began to write. A little more than a year later my manuscript was finished - I had the first draft of my first novel finished.

     Now I juggle work as a musician and teacher and my writing life. I love to write about ordinary people discovering what they can do. The blank page is a place I like to play. I give God the glory for the opportunity I have to write, and hope that I can do it to praise His name.

     I hope that my writing encourages people, gives them an escape from life, and uplifts them. I write because I enjoy writing, but it's also a way to reach out to others, to connect people, to remind us that we're not so different from each other. For all the length and breadth of the world and all the people that are in it, we are united by a divine spark of creativity, of imagination that binds us together. I hope that I might be a light and testimony, giving people hope and a glimpse of God's glory through my writing.

 - Jackson Kerr

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