Born in New York. At age 19 Joel Weishaus was Assistant Traffic Manager for a Madison Avenue advertising agency. In 1964, he moved to Berkeley, CA, where he was a student in the University of California, Department of Oriental Languages and Literary Editor of the student newspaper. In 1971, he edited On The Mesa: An Anthology of Bolinas Writing, (City Lights Books). That year, too, Cranium Press published his: Oxherding: A Reworking of the Zen Text, with Woodcuts by Arthur Okamura. In 1977,
During the early 1980s, living in Albuquerque NM,he was a photography critic for Artspace: A Quarterly of Contemporary Southwest Art.. In 1985, he was appointed Adjunct Curator of Video Art at the University of New Mexico’s Museum of Fine Arts, in Albuquerque, and a Writer-in-Residence at The Center for Southwest Research.
In 1991, his forty texts for the project The Nuclear Enchantment of New Mexico, were exhibited by the Albuquerque Museum. His Collected Poems, Feels Like Home Again, was published by Lavender Ink, New Orleans, in 2014. Weishaus has also published over fifty book reviews and essays.
In 2000, he moved to Portland, OR, where for seven years he was Visiting Faculty in the Department of English, Portland State University..In 2011-12, he was a Visiting Scholar and Research Fellow at the University of California, Santa Barbara. Presently, Weishaus is Artist-in-Residence and Counselor on Creative Scholarship at Pacifica Gradute Institute, Carpinteria, CA.. His primary work, paper and digital, is archived at The University of New Mexico.
