Hello everyone! My name is Jay Mollerskov, and I am honored to have been recently selected as the new ArtRoot Writer-In-Residence for the first half of 2026. That being the case, I wanted to take a few minutes to introduce myself here and write a bit about my background in the arts.
I have been a musician for most of my life, starting piano at age 6 and later adding trombone and guitar. I attended UW-Milwaukee for an undergrad degree where I studied Music Composition & Technology. It was during that time that I met and/or studied with a few of my long time friends and mentors including Dr. Yehuda Yannay, Steve Nelson-Raney, and Hal Rammel among others.
I mention these three people in particular because they all were active not only as musicians, but in the arts in general. I was encouraged by them to look at creativity in the broadest senses, incorporating other arts and media into musical performance when possible. It was also through them that I was introduced to Milwaukee fixtures like People’s Books and Woodland Pattern in the mid 1990s.
After working for years as a music instructor and performing with many of the top players from Milwaukee and Chicago on the jazz scene, I went back to UW-Milwaukee for a graduate Master of Music degree in Instrumental Performance on guitar where some of those same relationships were rekindled.
Since that time, I have founded and performed on many concerts and series including the Formations Series for New and Improvised Music at Woodland Pattern which is over a decade old now. I have been a part of avante-garde theater productions, written music for films, performed and improvised with modern dance companies, and for a few years I had a visual art studio where I mainly did encaustic painting (with melted wax,) and even co-currated an all-wax art show at the Racine Arts Council gallery at the time. All of these pursuits among the arts seemed to stem from the same creative spirit, and I consider that to be the same thing that informs my drive to cook, do basic woodworking projects, start a garden each year, etc. Ultimately, anything that creates something continues to yield a freshness and enjoyment that all seems to me to be tied together at its core.
A few years ago, I found myself watching a documentary about Bob Dylan’s Rolling Thunder Revue tour that took place in 1975-76. I had never been very into Dylan’s music before, but I think I finally started to “get it” over the course of the documentary. That tour happened to take place around the time I was born in 1976, so it was also very nostalgic to me, recalling the times I grew up in as a small child. However, the real point of interest for me was the format of the tour. This was after he had achieved stardom, played stadiums, but Dylan’s goal was to tour smaller towns and play in small theaters, bringing an intimacy to the performances and making it accessible to audiences that may have missed out otherwise. He brought many other acts along with him on the road and treated it almost like a vaudeville performance. Among the performers was Allen Ginsberg, and it was fascinating seeing him perform sections of Howl and other pieces live in front of small town audiences, as well as hearing private jams with Joni Mitchell (who I consider to be one of the best songwriters of all time) and others.
I came away from the documentary with a personal realization. While I had spent decades as a musician with a hand in many/most of the other arts, I couldn’t name almost any poets newer than Kerouac or Ginsberg (from whom we are a half-century removed) aside from a few local friends! This was something I needed to remedy! So, I reached out to my now dear friend, Nicholas Michael Ravnikar. I had heard Facebook reels of some of his poetry during the pandemic and had coordinated a recording project in the past which had included some of his work. I knew it was up my alley as a lover of the new, experimental, and abstract. Nicholas quickly gave me a short list of some poets to check out including Ted Berrigan, Sandra Simonds, and Dan Sullivan. I, of course, immediately bought books by all of them at Woodland Pattern and started reading. (I have continued to collect modern poetry and devour it as quickly and thoroughly as I can!) Beyond that, I tried my hand at writing poetry, something I hadn’t done since high school homework.
Within a week or so of these first attempts at writing, I thought about my advice to my private music students: perform with other people and/or in front of audiences whenever you can! With that in mind, I attended the Grassroots Open Mic hosted by Nick Ramsey. (It currently is the 2nd and 4th Wednesday of every month at 7pm, at Spectrum School of the Arts.)(https://www.instagram.com/spectrum.school.and.gallery)
I can’t say enough good things about Nick as a host. He has run this open mic for many years in Milwaukee and then Racine. When I showed up to my first one, I was delighted to hear Nick share a story with everyone that my mother was his 1st grade teacher, and the poems she and local guest artists visiting her class read were among the first reasons Nick got interested in poetry and writing. Since that time, I’ve continued to attend regularly, meeting many of the other regulars who have formed such a wonderful community between Racine and Kenosha!
As time went on, I started exploring other outlets as well including Linneman’s Poet’s Mondays hosted by Timothy Kloss, Woodland Pattern’s resound/return open mic hosted by Antonio Vargas-Nieto, and a monthly open mic in Chicago hosted by “Vito” Carl Vinci at Tangible books. I have also started hosting bi-monthly readings at Vintage & Modern Books in Racine with the goal of bringing in poets from outside our local community to read beside locals in hopes of fostering more connections between artists and cities. I feel like this has been a great success so far!
left to right: Darin Zimpel, Esteban Colon, Anada Werner, Nick Demske, Brenda Cardenas, Jay Mollerskov. Vintage & Modern Books 12/6/25
Here are links to Woodland Pattern and Linneman’s series:
https://linnemans.com/events/category/poets-monday/list/
Between these events and meeting many wonderful artists who have been generous with their advice, time, and friendship, I find myself here as the newest ArtRoot Writer-In-Residence! I continue to be fascinated by relatively abstract and experimental art and a lot of my writing and continued reading tends to move within those channels while appreciating and being supportive of whatever art my friends and colleagues produce and are interested in as well. After all, the arts in general wouldn’t be the wonderful thing they are today if we didn’t all learn from one another and continue to connect and engage in a multitude of ways!
“Electro-acoustic Dharma” concert performing poetry through experimental electronics w/ Bary Paul Clark at Voyageur Books 7/19/25
https://www.voyageurbookshop.com/
Although I’d like to thank everyone for their guidance and support, there are FAR too many names to list off here. Many of you know who you are if you’re reading this, and I’m sure I’ll be dropping some names here and there over the next several months. I will, however, reiterate that we are so lucky to have Woodland Pattern as a resource for poetry and other important literature within around a half hour drive of us. It is truly a national gem and hub of poetry in the Midwest. I encourage everyone to check it out.
With all that said, I will leave off for now by saying thank you once again to ArtRoot, and our local community of writers for being a part of this journey with me. In the upcoming weeks I plan to post with some details about how I approach writing because I often get questions since much of my writing is quite abstract. I’d like to dig into the history of Sound Poetry in some posts as well as either dissecting some of my own pieces or creating a new one over the course of a post, with commentary about how I am approaching each line. As most artists know, there is sometimes a bit of a flow state in play which is a tough thing to interrupt for the purposes of making notes about composition, but there are plenty of concrete tools I employ as well.
Happy New Year!
-Jay Mollerskov – ArtRoot Writer-In-Residence
ArtRoot Writer-In-Residence 