Jeff Weisman

Jeff Weisman is an Illinois novelist and a longtime English professor at Elgin Community College, where he has taught since 2002. He grew up in suburban Chicago, earned a BS at Illinois State University, completed an MA at the University of Colorado in Boulder, traveled in Europe in his twenties, spent several years in Portland, Oregon, and returned to Illinois to teach. He writes daily.

His debut JEF novel, "The Greatest Place on Earth": Personal Note: A Work of Absurdity? (Journal of Experimental Fiction vol. 91, JEF Books / Depth Charge Publishing, 2021), is an absurdist allegory about a respected psychology professor recruited by "The Bureau" to investigate a town whose residents have collectively gone mad. The book mixes stylistic invention, direct citations, outlandish humor, compassion, random dispatches, historical photographs, and faux documents to register what it felt like to live in America during the first two years of the Trump administration. Weisman began drafting it while teaching at ECC.

JEF also distributes his short prison-metaphor work Lifers: A micro-novel (under the byline Jeffrey Scott Weisman), which uses incarceration as a framework for asking how individual human nature shapes the course of a life. Its ISBN prefix is not the JEF house prefix, so it sits in the catalog as a distributed title rather than a numbered volume in the Journal of Experimental Fiction series.

Weisman is not a winner of the Kenneth Patchen Award, and his JEF list is small and recent. Start with "The Greatest Place on Earth", the title JEF gave a series volume and the clearest entry into his absurdist mode.