About ME

Bio

J. R. Welch is a writer and visual artist raised in Missouri’s Bootheel and based in New Orleans. His practice spans fiction, poetry, creative nonfiction, painting, installation, and photography, drawing on the people, histories, landscapes, and cultural life of the American South and the Mississippi River.

His writing and visual work move between family history, faith, class, folklore, migration, violence, humor, and the stories communities preserve or leave out of the record. The Mississippi River is a recurring geography rather than a fixed subject: a route connecting the Bootheel, Memphis, and New Orleans across the work.

Across media, birds, rivers, churches, houses, found objects, agricultural landscapes, and the human figure recur as a visual and literary vocabulary.

Alongside more than two decades of creative practice, Welch’s professional life has included founding an emerging faith community in post-Katrina New Orleans, leading nonprofit and community-based work, and serving in institutional leadership in South Florida. These experiences have placed him at the intersection of faith, community, culture, and public life in the American South.

In the years following Hurricane Katrina, Welch co-founded the Convergence Gallery and Center for the Arts in New Orleans. His writing and art have appeared in The Christian Century, Reckon Review, Blueline, The Queens Review, Pictura Journal, Amethyst Review, Tendrils, Microscopic, Up the Staircase Quarterly, and other publications. “The Line Between Us” was selected as cover art for The Oakland Review, Vol. LII, Gibbous. His short fiction was longlisted for The Southeast Review’s Best Short Short Award, judged by Kristen Arnett. He is a 2026 Ross Lynn Foundation Arts Interchange resident and an MFA candidate in Fine Arts at LSU New Orleans.

Artist Statement

Places remember, but they do not always tell the same story people do.

I grew up in Hayti, Missouri, at the northern edge of the Mississippi Delta, and have lived in New Orleans for more than two decades. The river connects those places across my work, not as scenery but as a moving record of labor, migration, faith, family, violence, humor, commerce, and survival.

I work across painting, installation, photography, poetry, fiction, and nonfiction. Birds, churches, houses, domestic objects, found materials, agricultural landscapes, and the human figure recur across the practice. I am interested in what stories are inherited, what becomes an “official” version, and what the body, an object, or a landscape may continue to hold when language fails or changes.

My process moves between observation, field photographs, research, memory, collected material, and revision. In drawing and painting, erasure and pentimento remain visible. In writing, physical detail often carries what explanation cannot. In installation, objects and archives can become witnesses themselves.

The work is personal, but it is not autobiography alone. It comes from a particular Southern geography while asking broader questions about belonging, authority, memory, faith, and the stories people construct in order to live with what happened.

J. R. Welch