Meet Jay Halsey | Humanitarian, Photographer, Writer

We had the good fortune of connecting with Jay Halsey and we’ve shared our conversation below.

Hi Jay, can you tell us more about your background and the role it’s played in shaping who you are today?
I was born and lived in or around Dayton, Ohio for the first 28 years of my life until I moved to Colorado 16 years ago. My mom raised my sister and me mostly single-handedly after she divorced our stepdad early in my life, and times were not always easy or smooth. In a lot of ways, Dayton was the quintessential factory/blue-collar town (mostly GM and Delco plants), and the families working at these plants lived solid and comfortable middle-class lives. Our mom worked at the local mall as a salesperson at a phone mart. The hourly pay was low but she earned a decent salary from the commission she made off sales. She worked hard and I remember thinking as a child and adolescent that all I needed to do when I became an adult was get a decent job, work hard, and I’d be set. By the time I graduated high school, many of the well-paying plants had moved out of Dayton in favor of cheaper labor, and the remaining plants, or really any jobs, no longer offered the livable wages they once did for our parents’ generation.

All of my experiences in Dayton, combined with my first-time and contrasting experiences of extreme affluence when I moved to Boulder, Colorado, began shifting my overall worldview on humanity as a whole, and more intensely on the role that “privilege” plays within our social and judicial constructs. My scope of what I considered “fair”/”unfair” regarding social equity and equality expanded much more when I began working at a nonprofit community resource center in 2009. Listening to people’s personal stories–from parents struggling to get by, to those living on the streets due to a single incident–was a real eye opener that not only permanently changed my entire outlook on life, but also who I am as a person.


Please tell us more about your work. We’d love to hear what sets you apart from others, what you are most proud of or excited about. How did you get to where you are today professionally. Was it easy? If not, how did you overcome the challenges? What are the lessons you’ve learned along the way. What do you want the world to know about you or your brand and story?
My work life in helping feed those in need and personal experiences with these people intersect and influence my overall aesthetic in my writing and photography.

From the time I was in 3rd grade and first read S.E. Hinton’s “The Outsiders,” I knew I wanted to tell stories about the forgotten and disenfranchised people in our society. Her novel, and more specifically the characters within, were the sort of anti-heroes that resonated with me even though I didn’t understand why until I began working with people in 2009 who lived on the streets, or at least people who struggled day-to-day just to get by. Empathy has always played a big role in my written themes–poetry, essays, short stories–all of it.

My desire to understand our ignored populations, and being submersed within the daily confrontations of the underclassed and underprivileged, began to shape my photography and what I chose to write. From the grit of blue-collar urbanscapes to the desolation and uneasy loneliness of the Eastern Plains, I began spending more time in these worlds, which are oftentimes considered unappealing subjects, to find the beauty and emotion that is often overlooked.

Is it easy? Depends on the aspect we’re referring to. Finding time and energy to create is by far my biggest challenge. I currently keep long and untraditional work hours. My job swallows most of my awake time and drains my mental and physical energy to the point that I find it difficult to want to do much else outside of work besides recover. Between the actual actions of shooting photos and writing, I do feel photography comes easier for me. It heightens and excites all my senses like writing, but without the mental taxation of trying to string together words into coherent thoughts. All that said, once I finish edits of a set of photos from a day of shooting, or completing a rough draft of a written piece, the exhaustion of daily life disappears and gives way to the serotonin rush of creating something just as I intended. I don’t find any aspect of creating to be easy, but the process is always rewarding and luckily for me, all the efforts have culminated into some amazing opportunities.

My first two solo photography shows were in 2014 and 2016 at Still Cellars, a distillery and arthouse (now defunct). The 2014 show consisted mostly of rural landscapes: Lots of dust and drought, ominous skies, and abandoned houses in the middle of nowhere. The crowd loved the work and I sold most of the 16 pieces I displayed by the end of the show’s one-month run. I took a different direction for the 2016 show and displayed 22 pieces mostly of people as the main subjects–some wearing bizarre pig masks or surplus gas masks–set against and/or within foreboding landscapes, dilapidated structures, and time-lapsed screen projections of my own photography. The opening itself was a success, but once the show had run its course, I had only sold a fraction of the pieces I sold in 2014. I can only assume that the majority of viewers did not want the darker aesthetic of those sorts of pieces on the walls of their homes or offices. I was a little disappointed. The people who loved them really loved them, but those are not the same people who can afford to drop fair sums of money on art. I was also pleased because a lot of those pieces were and still are some of my favorite works to date, and the people who have the money to spend on art were not the people buying/wanting those pieces. My worldview on the advantages and disadvantages of belonging within a class structure felt validated in a way.

I’ve had so many big and great experiences simply creating what I love, which have finally led me to my number one aspiration of publishing a collection containing a twelve-year span of my selected photographs and poetry and prose pieces: “Barely Half in an Awkward Line”. is due out in the fall of this year from Really Serious Literature. It has been one of the most challenging and rewarding processes of creation I’ve encountered so far in my life and I’m excited to see it in the world.

I don’t write for writers and I don’t shoot photos for photographers. Everything I create is foremost and always for people who haven’t had easy access or introductions to literature and art, or even the awareness that certain literature and art exists.


Let’s say your best friend was visiting the area and you wanted to show them the best time ever. Where would you take them? Give us a little itinerary – say it was a week long trip, where would you eat, drink, visit, hang out, etc.
A week-long visit is way too much for me. Ha! For a great day, though, I’d take a friend who is new to the area to Mutiny Information Cafe to browse endless books and check out what’s good from local writers. From there, we head to Twist & Shout to sample music and peruse the long aisles of vinyl, CD’s, and cassettes. After that, a tasty lunch at The Ethiopian, then we cap the day off with several varieties of whiskey at the Whiskey Bar on Larimer.

The Shoutout series is all about recognizing that our success and where we are in life is at least somewhat thanks to the efforts, support, mentorship, love and encouragement of others. So is there someone that you want to dedicate your shoutout to?
My partner Hillary Leftwich for her unending support and constant encouragement for me to carry my writing and photography much further than I ever would have attempted without her. She is an extremely driven author and teacher who is a role model to many people, including me.

The entire non-profit feeding network in the Denver metro area that provides basic life essentials to help those in need.

The writing and arts community at large in the Denver metro area. So many of the good people and organizers have provided me with opportunities that I would not have had otherwise.

Website: 500px.com/Jay_Halsey

Instagram: instagram.com/yeslah.yaj/

Facebook: facebook.com/jagainst/

Other: rlysrslit.bigcartel.com/product/barely-half-in-an-awkward-line

Image Credits

Barely Half in an Awkward Line book cover (file name: “halsey 1”): design by Tex Gresham, photo by Jay Halsey

All other photos by Jay Halsey