Jack Mayer is  one of two winners of the Proverse Prize 2019 with his poetry collection, "Poems from the Wilderness".

He is a Vermont writer and pediatrician. He was an anti-Vietnam war activist in the ’60s and was arrested at a demonstration in Chicago in 1969. His legal case, argued before the U.S. Supreme Court (Mayer vs. City of Chicago, 1971), established the right of indigents to have court costs paid by the state. (By the time he was in medical school he had college and medical school debts. His only valuable possessions were his microscope and textbooks. In a New York Times article about his trial, the Chicago judge was quoted as expressing his surprise that in America a medical student could be judged an indigent.)

            In 1976 Dr Mayer established the first pediatric practice in Vermont’s Eastern Franklin County on the Canadian border, where he began writing about his practice and hiking Vermont’s Long Trail. In the ’80s Mayer was an anti-nuclear activist and New England delegate to Physicians for Social Responsibility.

            Dr Mayer was a National Cancer Institute Fellow at Columbia University, researching the molecular biology of cancer (1987-1991). He established Rainbow Pediatrics in Middlebury, Vermont, in 1991 and continues to practice pediatrics there. He is an Instructor in Pediatrics at the University of Vermont School of Medicine and a pre-med mentor at Middlebury College. He was a participant at the Bread Loaf Writers’ Conference in 2003 and 2005 (fiction) and 2008 (poetry). His first non-fiction book is Life In A Jar: The Irena Sendler Project. His new book, Before The Court Of Heaven, is historical fiction.