Travis Jeppesen

Who is Travis Jeppesen?

Travis Jeppesen is an American novelist, poet, and art critic.

He grew up in Charlotte, North Carolina and moved to New York City at the age of 17. He received his B.A. from The New School, where he studied literature and philosophy. He later studied literary translation at the University of Paris III: Sorbonne Nouvelle and art history at the Open University. In 2001, Jeppesen moved to Europe. He lives in Berlin and London.

Jeppesen's first novel, Victims, is ostensibly about the final days of a UFO religious cult loosely based on Heaven's Gate. The novel utilizes a heavily fragmented narrative to tell numerous related stories in an imaginary small town in the United States called Monkhole. Poems I Wrote While Watching TV, a collaboration with painter Jeremiah Palecek, was published by BLATT Books in 2006. The next year, Twisted Spoon Press published Jeppesen's latest novel, Wolf at the Door. In 2009, Dicklung & Others, a volume of poetry, was released by BLATT Books.

In addition, Jeppesen's work has been anthologized in The Edgier Waters, 3:AM London, Paris, New York, and The Offbeat Generation.

In 2008, his play Daddy premiered at the HAU Theater in Berlin, under the direction of Ron Athey. A riffing on the Lolita myth, the play explores what happens when an 11-year-old boy impregnates his school teacher. Simultaneously, the boy's mother becomes involved with a local UFO cult. In Jeppesen's words, "The 'daddy' of the title is an 11-year-old boy, who, fatherless, becomes a father himself – and then, by a certain turn of events, doesn’t. The other father, I suppose, is Preacher Creacher, the leader of the cult, who instills himself as a fake father over others – yet his sincerity is ambivalent throughout. So the figure of the father goes through many cycles of presence and absence throughout the course of the play. In this sense, I’d say it’s quite productive – we’re gonna make a lot more daddies than we are babies."