A Runaway Speedboat Ripping Through the Desert...

Jamie Alliotts has lived in 14 U.S. states―New York, New Jersey, New Hampshire, Vermont, Virginia, Florida, Iowa, Illinois, Alabama, Texas, Colorado, California, Massachusetts, Pennsylvania―and he's survived more than a dozen overdoses, five totaled car wrecks, a few half-assed murder attempts, two suicide attempts, and the many gruesome deaths & disappearances that have rocked and decimated his family: those from AIDS, murder, suicide, Mesothelioma, and at least three vanishings. Alliotts now lives unabashedly with Complex Post Traumatic Stress Disorder (C-PTSD) and worsening visual impairment. He is a fierce advocate for disability and victims' rights.

During the late 1980s and early- to mid-1990s, while dropping in and out of community college, Alliotts followed the bands God Street Wine and The Grateful Dead around the country. Jerry Garcia died in 1995. Alliotts's father, Charlie, then died in 1996―a stark awakening. In January 1997, Alliotts joined the U.S. Navy in an attempt to kick what was, by then, a full-blown heroin addiction. Things started out well, but then his brother Jackie, only 37 years old, died in December of that year. After a year-and-a-half as a serviceman and after a great deal of cat-and-mouse with NCIS and the other military authorities who kept after him for his now-relentless heroin use―as he ducked and dodged and continually evaded capture, at one point leaving base and going on the run―Alliotts eventually struck a plea deal; turned himself in; stood court-martial; served "short time" in the Norfolk Naval Brig (for speedballing morphine & cocaine ― and for infuriating one particular master chief time and again); and was, at last, discharged in early 1998.

He took a bus ride north and cast himself into homelessness on the streets of New York City, determined to end his life in the gutter. His addiction, anguish, feelings of abandonment, alienation, utter isolation, and his profound, inescapable grief had finally caught up with him. In 1999, after leaving the street―by taking a bus out to Jersey to escape the 5-man ring of dope dealers who had set out to kill him and who'd put a bounty on his head for other street addicts to claim―Alliotts landed in rehab, with a $350-per-day habit. He proceeded to kick and scream and throw pills at nurses, doctors, fellow-patients ― at doors and walls and mop buckets ― and he wasn't able to read or sleep, for any real length of time, for nearly 90 days. Still, slowly, surely, methodically, he started to turn his life around. He moved back home with his mother, who struck a simple deal with him the very first night she picked him up outside the hospital and each morning thereafter: "Don't use today, and you can sleep here tonight." Alliotts honored this deal with his mother, day after day, breakfast after breakfast. He delivered pizza, walked to 12-Step meetings, made his bed, helped his neighbors, and he comforted and laughed with and got to know his mother for the first time. She, too, was grieving deeply. After stabilizing and gaining steam and interest in the world about him, Alliotts returned to that same community college that he had failed out of so many times before; but this time with clarity, purpose, and good will. Less than two years later, he had been admitted and transferred to Columbia University, where he began studying Spanish, Religion, Mythology, Physics, Russian Drama. He ultimately majored in what felt to him like a pre-ordained discipline: World Literature & Creative Writing. Alliotts hoped to eventually help through his writings―to soothe, humor, provoke, inspire, and make wonder―others who might be traveling similar paths to those he had traversed and survived. In 2004, he graduated Columbia with high honors―magna cum laude―marking the first time he had ever pushed himself hard enough and long enough to harness and employ his potential ― and to enjoy sustained success in an academic setting. In any setting. He also made friends. Some of whom he still swaps stories with.

During all these years and the two decades that have followed, Alliotts traveled widely, studied at Oxford, earned his master's degree from Dartmouth, and worked many jobs: as a house painter, a bike messenger, a bagel jerk, deli jerk, pizza jerk, a waiter, bartender, dish washer, a vat scrubber (aboard the aircraft carrier USS George Washington), as a wood chucker, t-shirt folder, construction hand, paralegal, as Assistant Director of Corporate & Foundation Relations (for a top-ten business school), doing lease & title administration for a wind energy company, and as one who snaps together those little plastic air-freshener thingies during graveyard shifts at a desolate warehouse somewhere ― far out, there ― in remote Colorado.

Since eluding those murderous drug dealers, leaving the street behind, and permanently kicking heroin in 1999, Alliotts has become an award-winning playwright, a published essayist, a trusted and respected literary or "immersion" journalist, and a photographer. Born and raised in Bergen County, New Jersey, his plays have enjoyed full-production runs at the Brooklyn Lyceum, the Southern Rep Theatre, the University of New Orleans, and as part of the Dramatists Guild's online event, Live from the Anarchist Jurisdiction. Alliotts's "painful comedy," A Waltz Between, won the Tennessee Williams Literary Festival Playwriting Award. His drama, fiction, essays, photography, poetry, and immersion journalism appear or are forthcoming in numerous literary journals, including Virginia Quarterly Review, Star 82 Review, Bayou, Mouth, Cleaver, and Stone Canoe. Throughout his career, Alliotts has likewise garnered prizes, awards, scholarships, fellowships, and grants from Columbia, Dartmouth, Oxford, Iowa, and The Dramatists Guild of America, of which he remains a member.

Alliotts lives in the ether with a mason jar named Fiammetta; he can be reached by paper airplane.