Jonathan Lyons

Jonathan Lyons (1967-2019) was an Iowa-born experimental novelist, short-story writer, editor, and educator whose work moved between literary postmodernism, techno-noir science fiction, and transhumanist philosophy. Born August 31, 1967, in Waterloo, Iowa, he took a B.A. in English from the University of Iowa in 1997 and an M.F.A. in creative writing from the California College of the Arts in 2005. From 2005 to 2016 he taught at Bucknell University in Lewisburg, Pennsylvania, as a Lecturer in the College Core Curriculum, with occasional adjunct stints at nearby Susquehanna University; his obituary singled out his mentorship of students in Bucknell's Posse Scholars Program as the work he was proudest of. He died December 14, 2019, in Iowa City, aged 52.

Lyons published across genres. His debut, the cyberpunk-noir novel Burn (2000), won the Wordweaving Award for Literary Excellence and was reissued by Domhan Books, which also published the speculative-metaphysical novel Machina. Signal to Noise (The Foundry: A Literary Collective, 2011), the press's inaugural title and a Pushcart Press Editors' Choice nominee, is a postmodern coming-of-age novel set in late-1980s Iowa City, with song lyrics woven through the prose. He closed the decade with the short-story collection The White Noise Album (2015). A self-described transhumanist, he served on the Lifeboat Foundation's Futurism Board and in 2017 founded Cicatrix Press and its journal Cicatrix: A Journal of Experimentation.

His one JEF Books title, Minnows: A Shattered Novel (Journal of Experimental Fiction Series #55, 2013), was made by a deliberately physical method: Lyons cut his draft into blocks and columns, pinned the fragments across his basement walls, and reassembled the exploded narrative into a unified whole around two brothers whose summer is detonated by trauma. From roughly 2015 he stylized his byline as "Jønathan Lyons," with a slashed O, though JEF retained the unslashed spelling on Minnows. Start with Minnows: A Shattered Novel for the JEF chapter of his work.