welcome

J. K. Fowler was an inaugural fellow in the CA for the Arts Grassroots Artists Advocacy Program (GAAP) and 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 also serves as Policy and Operations Analyst with BAMBD, CDC, happily living at the intersection of arts, policy, and organizing. He founded Nomadic Press in 2011, a community-rooted publishing house headquartered in Oakland that paused operations in 2023 and will reemerge in a different form in 2026, with Nomadic Bookshop, opened with his husband Uriel in December 2025, as its new home and experiment in radical hospitality and book love. He is a 2025–2026 Emerging Artists Professional Fellow, a title that mostly confirms his suspicion that making spreadsheets for artists is, in fact, an art form.

His current work is focused on the entanglements of civic bodies, private development, and arts organizations, with a particular obsession with 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 writes about fascism, technofeudalism, privacy, solidarity economies, and the geographies of repair in a voice that insists rigor and accessibility can coexist in the same sentence. He is interested in launching an advocacy body to help communities of artists and arts organizations navigate the often bewildering processes involved in negotiating community benefits agreements among stakeholders who are not always aligned on what the most effective way forward looks like.

Across his writing and organizing, he is in ongoing conversation with Black, Indigenous, queer, and other liberation lineages, treating his work as one small contribution to much older and wider currents of resistance, care, and world-building. He believes deeply in the transformational power of self-determination, mycelial curiosity and inquiry, justice, and the act of intentionally weaving and tending to community. He is currently working on a book titled Making Space, and, when possible, also making time for snacks, long walks, and the perpetual reshuffling of bookshelves.