Bio, Credentials, Agenting

Jamie Alliotts is an award-winning writer and photographer from Oradell, New Jersey. His prose, drama, immersion journalism, and photography have appeared in numerous literary journals, including Virginia Quarterly Review, Hobart, Cleaver, and Bayou, among still others. Alliotts’s “painful comedy,” A Waltz Between, won the 19th-annual Tennessee Williams Literary Festival Playwriting Award. His essay, Remains, won Alliotts the University of New Hampshire MFA Program’s inaugural Nonfiction Writing Award, which was judged, independent of UNH faculty, by notable memoirist Melanie Brooks. His short play about addiction, Slavery, took 2nd Prize at the October 2002 Swampking Play Festival.


After watching his father Charlie die of Mesothelioma in 1996, and then watching his brother Jack die of AIDS the following year, Alliotts descended into severe heroin addiction and ended up living on the streets of New York City. Until April 1999, when he eluded a group of murderous drug runners, fled the City, and cleaned up. He has been writing ever since.


During these intervening 27 years, Alliotts has seen his plays performed at the Brooklyn Lyceum, The Southern Rep, the University of New Orleans, and as part of The Dramatists Guild of America’s online event, “Live from the Anarchist Jurisdiction.” His Tennessee Williams winner, A Waltz Between, had its first staged reading at St. Paul’s Chapel, on the Columbia University campus, as part of an evening of readings organized and overseen by Tony Award®-winning director and producer Gregory Mosher. In 2004, Alliotts earned from Columbia his B.A. magna cum laude in World Literature & Creative Writing. In 2016, he earned his M.A. in Liberal Studies (Creative Writing Concentration) from Dartmouth College. During his time at Dartmouth, Alliotts was selected, as one of only two graduate students, for admission to the Advanced Track of the abroad writing program at the University of Oxford, where he earned his Certificate with honors. The recipient of numerous scholarships, fellowships, and appointed TAships over the years, Alliotts has also taught rhetorical analysis and persuasive, compositional, and creative writing to undergraduate and graduate students at various universities.


Since 2025, Alliotts has had one of his plays accepted for performance at a festival in Vermont. His “surreal, caliginous discourse,” Those Little Red Jelly Things, was included in Shanta Lee Honeycutt’s online art project, Food Memory Stories. And his short play, Black Russian (a sly grottesco), will soon be published in Stone Canoe, a geographically niche yet highly esteemed literary journal dedicated to all things Upstate New York.


Recently diagnosed with a vitreous detachment and macular dystrophy, Alliotts is currently and urgently seeking literary representation for his 5-book constellation or "world" of memoirs detailing his many years spent navigating addiction, homelessness, civilian and military jails, calamitous "sober living" facilities, the broader 12-Step Industrial Complex, shelter systems, a period of captivity, numerous near-death experiences, and the time―as a teenager―he went on the lam with another boy who would, years later, appear on the notorious true-crime series, "America's Most Wanted." He is also planning―if his eyesight allows―to write additional creative nonfiction books, including one about his relationship with his oldest, disabled brother Richie (now deceased) and one linking his childhood trauma to the precarious, hardscrabble life he led during his later teen years and young adulthood.


Alliotts lives in the ether with a mason jar named Fiammetta. He can be reached by paper airplane. Or by clicking the above menu and heading to his Contact page.