More about what I do:
JOHN PIETARO IS A WRITER, POET, SPOKEN WORD ARTIST AND MUSICIAN FROM BROOKLYN, NY. Columnist/critic of The NYC Jazz Record, Pietaro's latest work is the poetry/fiction collection A Bleeding in Black Leather to be published by Uncollected Press/Raw Art Review in 2022. In late 2020, his The Mercer Stands Burning: Night Poems was published by Atmosphere Press, and in 2019 Pietaro self-published chapbook Smoke Rings. He's a contributing arts reporter to PleaseKillMe, The Wire (UK), Z, Sensitive Skin, AllAboutJazz, The Nation, The Village Sun, Counter Punch, People's World, TruthOut and others.
Other credits include seven entries in the upcoming edition of The Encyclopedia of the American Left (Verso), and poetry or fiction for numerous international anthologies as well as multiple journals. Pietaro also penned contemporary proletarian fiction collection Night People & Other Tales of Working New York (2013) and contributed a chapter to Paul Buhle and Harvey Pekar's SDS: A Graphic History (Hill & Wang 2007).
Pietaro directs the Dissident Arts Festival, hosts radio shows 'Beneath the Underground' (WFMU-FM/Sheena's Jungle Room stream starting 4/13/22) and 'Jazz Just After Dark' (makerparkradio.nyc), and fronts post-punk free jazz/poetry ensemble the Red Microphone, recording artists of the ESP-Disk label. The band's heading back into the studio in May 2022 to record a new album, but last, And I Became of the Dark was released in 2021. In 2017 the Red Microphone collaborated with Amina Baraka for the album Amina Baraka & the Red Microphone (ESP-Disk). Ms. Baraka also performed Pietaro's "Her Side of the Road" as a dramatic reading in 2018.
A guest speaker at Left Forum and the Vision Festival, Pietaro has been featured at The International Human Rights Arts Festival 2021, Great Weather for Media's Spoken Word Sundays, People's Music Network Festival 2022, Workers United Film Festival 2016, UpSurge JazzPoetry Festival and other venues. He's collaborated with Allen Ginsberg, Pete Seeger, Amina Baraka, Karl Berger, Steve Dalachinsky, Nora Guthrie, Erika Dagnino, Ras Moshe, historian Paul Buhle, record producers Ivan Julian and Kramer, among many more.
