Jon was born in Derby in 1983, studied English Literature with Creative Writing in Norwich and currently lives in Whitechapel, London. He works part time as a court transcript editor (or scopist1, in US terminology), and has covered cases including the Leveson Inquiry and the Archer Inquiry into NHS Supplied Contaminated Blood and Blood Products.
For the other part of the time, he works mostly as a writer and small publisher. In 2005, he started the arts journal Fuselit alongside Kirsten Irving, and in 2009 the pair began publishing collaborative anthologies of poetry and illustration under the imprint Sidekick Books. As well as being an editor and occasional contributor to these books, Jon handles the design, copy writing and picture editing elements and builds and maintains the related websites.
After being published in a wide range of journals and magazines (including a short story in Bizarre), he was highly commended in the 2009 National Poetry Competition, following which he has authored a variety of electronic and print pamphlets, some collaboratively, starting with Scarecrows (Happenstance, 2010). He was commended again in the 2011 National Poetry Competition and won a Society of Authors Eric Gregory Award in 2012. A full length collection, School of Forgery, was published by Salt in the same year and was a Poetry Book Society Summer Recommendation.
His poetry has also been included in numerous anthologies, including City State: New London Poetry (Penned in the Margins, 2009), The Best British Poetry 2011 (Salt, 2011), Split Screen (Red Squirrel Press, 2012) and Adventures in Form (Penned in the Margins, 2012), and he has written articles for the National Association of Writers in Education, Poetry News and Cereal: Geek, among others.
Jon has a keen interest in collaborative writing experiments. He conceived and put together the supplementary booklets that have been packaged with recent issues of Fuselit, including Chimerium, which allowed you to mix and match parts of poems by a variety of poets, and Telemorphics, in which Hugo Williams, Kathryn Simmonds, Emily Berry and others all 'translated' each other's work. This interest carries over into his work with Sidekick Books.
Jon also has a tentative sideline in illustration. In 2010, he produced illustrated poems as part of the inaugural exhibition at The Gopher Hole in Shoreditch, and in early 2011, he contributed to A New Face, a pan-European collaborative art project incorporating the work of over 220 artists over the span of a decade.