Ari Messer

“Ari Messer is a writer and musician.”

I’m currently a contributing editor at The Rumpus.

I’m the editor of The Post-Post, whose first issue is ever closer.

There is the past. From 2005-2009, I was a regular contributor to the San Francisco Bay Guardian. I’ve also written for the San Francisco Chronicle, Paste, Guitar Player, Guitar World Acoustic, ALARM, Chapman, Dwell.com, Orbitz.com, EDGE Boston, Turning Wheel, Dharmalife, Spring Wind, Portals, j. the jewish news weekly, Prism Review, the Three Percent blog, and the photography magazine Color. I was formerly an arts & lifestyle stringer for the Santa Cruz Sentinel. I was the in-house editor of the anthology A Wild Haruki Chase: Reading Murakami Around the World (Stone Bridge Press, 2008).

I did my MFA in Edinburgh, where I worked for Chapman magazine.

I have composed soundscores for the choreographers Brittany Brown Ceres (Dance Ceres), Tom Mayock (Dance Outre), Abby Neithlich Rappoport (Subject to Change), and Peiyi Ko (SophoChoreia Performance Group). My sound has appeared at Brookdale Lodge, Cafe du Nord, the Garage, the Makeout Room, Fernwood Resort, the Marin Civic Center, NOH Space, and numerous other venues in California and Scotland.

I currently live in Brooklyn, where I’m working, at once, on six larger projects: SMART, a narrative nonfiction book of one hundred true dreams about the 18th-century poet-prophet Christopher Smart; How to Talk to Women About Music, a novel based on the lives of jazz musicians who died in mysterious ways; The Kabbalist, a novella; an ongoing art project/event called National Public Radio; Pray Tell: A Séance for Warren Zevon, an art event; and a solo music project under the name Ari Messer, a name I was given a few weeks after my premature birth in Santa Cruz, California; a name that means Lion Knife, or so I am told.

I’m at editor[at]ayenaye[dot]com.