​J Michael Walker

Literature for Life, the brainchild of novelist Jervey Tervalon, is a cool web-based project that gathers short contemporary fiction, non-fiction and poetry, principally by Los Angeles-based authors of various communities, on LiteratureforLife.net, where they can be accessed by middle and high school students and educators, to supplement the standard offerings of outdated, expensive textbooks, which often do not reflect the growing diversity of teen audiences.

 

I've been fortunate enough to join Jervey pretty much from the ground up, as the project's principal artist and art director. I find Literature for Life an enormously freeing project to work on, as I am under no obligation to be consistent in style or medium, but rather to only be true to the author's vision, as I see it.

 

As a consequence, I get to explore a variety of media and approaches: whatever seems the best way to createa a visual metaphor for the writer's vision.