Author: Jack Litewka

Jack Litewka was born in New York City of WWII immigrant parents and spent his public school years in Los Angeles. He earned a B.A. at U.C., Berkeley (English and History major) and an M.F.A. (Poetry) at Columbia University's School of the Arts, where he studied with Adrienne Rich and Stanley Kunitz. He is the author of two chapbooks - How the Conversation Began (Momo's Press) and The Dolphin and the Piano (Neon Sun Press) - and of a number of essays. As an undergraduate, he won first prize in the Ida Coolbrith Memorial Poetry Contest and was also the recipient of a Woodrow Wilson Fellow. He has worked as a taxi driver, management consultant, deli and fish department manager at a coop supermarket, director of a training organization for nonprofits and coops, baker in a bakery collective, managing director of a small publishing house, ergonomics consultant, editor (of magazines and of over 40 books), and a director at Microsoft, among other positions. From 1996 thorugh 2005 he managed large website teams at Microsoft responsible for creating and maintaing 92 public-facing product websites. He is currently Sr. Director of a worldwide technical-training business within Microsoft Services. He is the inventor of a number of products and training devices, and holds three patents, one of which won an industrial design award. He has served on the boards of directors of the ACLU of Washington, Women Against Violence/Emergency Services (Berkeley), Men Against Domestic Violence (New Haven), and the Berkeley Men's Center. He is married to Jane W. Ellis (fiction writer, and former professor of law and psychoanalyst), and they visit their 8-year-old granddaughter and 5-year-old grandson, whom they adore beyond words, as often as possible -- and, course, also visit their daughter and her husband.