welcome
J. K. Fowler is the current Executive Director of the Bay Area Book Festival, where he helps convene readers, writers, and assorted troublemakers for conversations that stretch from the hyperlocal to the global. He was an inaugural fellow in the CA for the Arts Grassroots Artists Advocacy Program (GAAP) (2024–25) and is currently part of the Oakland Arts and Wellness cohort, supported in part by Center for Cultural Power. He also serves as Policy and Operations Analyst with BAMBD, CDC, happily living at the intersection of arts, policy, and organizing. He is the founding publisher of Nomadic Press, which was founded in 2011 and continues to this day (with a brief pause from 2023–2026). In December of 2025, he opened Nomadic Bookshop with his husband, Uriel.
His current work is focused on the entanglements of civic bodies, private development, and arts organizations, with a particular interest in community benefits agreements that can help ensure artist and arts organization retention in the cities they love and support. He is thinking a lot about mycelial bodies and encircling, how networks, rings, and slow-growing root systems might offer alternative models for civic engagement, development, and cultural infrastructure, and how these concepts can reshape negotiations between private developers, civic bodies, and cultural workers. As a public essayist, he has written about alternative forms of arts advocacy, fascism, technofeudalism, privacy, solidarity economies, geographies of repair, and more.
He believes deeply in the transformational power of communal-determination, mycelial curiosity and inquiry, justice, and the act of intentionally weaving and tending to humans. He is currently working on a book titled Making Space, a guide that offers aspiring small publishers and cultural creators the nuts-and-bolts knowledge for how to start and run a small press and host cultural programming. This wide-ranging nuts-and-bolts "how to publish" creative nonfiction text is paired with the aesthetic philosophy of literally and figuratively making space on the page and stage and pulls from the experience of founding and running Nomadic Press.