Junior Burke, from January 2006 to June 2010, served as Chair of Naropa University’s Jack Kerouac School of Disembodied Poetics in Boulder, Colorado, and remains on its faculty.
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His writing has taken a number of forms: novelist, dramatist and songwriter. In the mid-90s, while under contract to write songs in Nashville, Burke began teaching at Tennessee State University. He also produced the soundtrack to the independent film American Reel, which starred David Carradine and Mariel Hemingway, and featured some of the last substantial recordings of master fiddler Vassar Clements. His three-act play American Express was directed by the legendary Paul Sills at his theatre in Hollywood and featured Severn Darden, Paul Sand, and Laraine Newman. In the nineties Burke’s prose began to achieve notice, receiving an award in the essay category from New Millennium Writing, one of six writers cited nationally. In 1999, he was invited to Naropa University to teach in the Summer Writing Program. . He began teaching for Naropa online, and designed and implemented a low residency MFA degree in Creative Writing. In 2004, he founded the e/zine not enough night[1] which has published Kerouac School co-founder Anne Waldman, Amiri Baraka and Ed Sanders. Also in that year, he accepted a Lecturer’s position in the Film Studies Department at the University of Colorado. After three years of directing Naropa’s low/res program, he was tapped to be Chair of Writing & Poetics for the Kerouac School, founded in 1974 by poets Anne Waldman and Allen Ginsberg.
In 2004, The Boulder Museum of Contemporary Art produced the song-cycle Someone Else’s Dream, featuring vocalist Ethelyn Friend, accompanied by piano and string quartet. The novel Something Gorgeous (Farfalla, McMillan & Parrish) appeared in 2005.[2] This work of speculative fiction explored the historical background of the era that spawned The Great Gatsby, and was lauded for its invention by the UK's Historical Novels Review. A compact disc of original songs, While You Were Gone,[3] produced by Jim Tullio on Red Thread Records, was chosen by New York's Bowery Poetry Club as one of the best poetry CDs of 2007.
Also in 2008, he received Naropa’s President’s Award, selected by his fellow faculty for his commitment to that university’s contemplative, Buddhist-inspired mission. In 2010, he delivered the Faculty Address at Naropa's commencement. He has been a source for such publications as Le Monde and The London Observer, when they presented features on the 50th anniversary of Kerouac’s On the Road.
Most recently, Burke was one of the chief organizers of the first-of-its-kind "Poetic Film Symposium" held in Boulder in June, 2011. A collaboration between Naropa and the University of Colorado, the event was largely funded by a Mellon Grant presented to Tom Gunning of the University of Chicago. Besides showing classic works of experimental film, it also premiered a number of new films, as well as presentations from eminent film scholars such as Gunning and Daniel Kane, author of "We Saw the Light: Conversations Between New American Cinema and Poetry." Burke's account of the event, "Notice What You Notice" appeared in Bomb Magazine.
Books:
Something Gorgeous (novel) 2005
Beats at Naropa (anthology, interview with Ed Sanders) 2009
Theatrical Works:
Nothing Rhymes With Orange (monologue, published by the e/zine pinstripe fedora) 2010
Almost Eden (directed one-woman show of Bobbie Louise Hawkins) Boulder Museum of Contemporary Art, 2001; Joe's Pub, The Public Theatre, New York, 2002.
Someone Else's Dream (song-cycle) Boulder Museum of Contemporary Art, 2004
Albums:
While You Were Gone (compact disc) Red Thread Records, 2007
East of Midnight (producer of compact disc by Vicki Lewis) Betting on the Muse Records, 2010