Portis Symposium Keynote Speaker

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Jay Jennings

Jay Jennings is a writer and editor whose work has appeared in many national newspapers and magazines including the New York Times, Wall Street Journal, Lowbrow Reader, Garden and Gun, and Oxford American, where he was an editor from 2015 to 2021.​

His most recent editing project is "Charles Portis: Collected Works from the Library of America," which came out in April 2023. It contains the complete novels and much, but not all, other writing that was assembled in 2012 for "Escape Velocity: A Charles Portis Miscellany." That collection was named Book of the Year for 2012 by Books and Culture, and the New York Times Book Review called it “a thoughtfully composed selection of published work spiced with rare and fresh material.” Jennings has recently completed a screenplay with TV writer Graham Gordy (Rectify, Quarry), adapted from Portis’s 1979 novel "The Dog of the South." He often speaks about "True Grit" and Charles Portis under the National Endowment for the Arts’ Big Read program.

Jennings’s book "Carry the Rock: Race, Football and the Soul of an American City," about the Little Rock, Arkansas, Central High School football team 50 years after the 1957 integration crisis, was recently reissued in a revised edition with a new author's preface by the University of Arkansas Press. The Wall Street Journal said that it "transcends the season-on-the-brink genre."

He began his writing career as a reporter at Sports Illustrated, followed by four years as features editor at Tennis magazine. While at the latter, he edited an anthology of short stories and poetry called "Tennis and the Meaning of Life" (Breakaway Books, 1999), which the New Yorker called “a delight—and perhaps a surprise—to those who know and care about literature.” His work has been recognized by The Best American Sports Writing annual and has appeared in the humor anthology "Mirth of a Nation: The Best Contemporary Humor." A regular contributor to the New York Times Book Review and the San Francisco Chronicle’s “Books” section, he is a two-time MacDowell Colony fellow in fiction and a winner of a fiction grant from the Arkansas Arts Council for a novel-in-progress.​

Jennings currently lives with his wife and daughter in Little Rock, Arkansas, where he was born and raised.

Learn more by visiting Jay Jennings' website.

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Jonathan Portis is the youngest of three Portis brothers – Charles, Richard and Jonathan, in that order. Their sister, Aliece Portis Sawyer, the eldest sibling, died at a young age. Their father, Samuel Palmer Portis, was a school superintendent and taught history and English. Their mother, Alice Waddell Portis, was a poet and journalist in her rare spare moments away from her main job of keeping three boys out of trouble.

Jonathan grew up in Hamburg, in the southeast corner of Arkansas, and graduated high school there. Charles and Richard worked for several newspapers and Richard later became a physician. Jonathan, after graduating college with a B.A. in English, hopped on his brothers’ coattails and worked at the Memphis Commercial Appeal and the Arkansas Gazette. When the Gazette was shuttered in 1991 he worked in corporate public relations for 20 years before retiring.

Richard and Jonathan are directors of the Charles M. Portis Estate, LLC, which handles all affairs concerning the works of Charles Portis.