JAY FELDMAN was born in Brooklyn, NY, and grew up rooting for the Brooklyn Dodgers. During the years he attended Brooklyn College, he was a member of the Kings County Outpatients, Brooklyn's first bluegrass band.

After receiving his B.A. in Speech and Theater in 1963, he moved to California to do graduate work at U.C. Berkeley, where he was arrested in the Free Speech Movement in Fall 1964. He got his M.A. in Dramatic Art from UCB in 1965, and completed two more years of work on a doctorate before leaving Berkeley.

He lived on a rural commune in Northern California from 1969-1974. In 1975, he moved to Santa Fe, N.M., where he made his living as a working musician, and also owned and operated Music of the Spheres, a music store specializing in vintage stringed instruments. He returned to California in 1980 to concentrate on writing.

In 1985, he founded Baseball for Peace, a humanitarian, grassroots effort to increase understanding between the people of the United States and the people of Nicaragua. Between 1985 and 1990, Baseball for Peace sent five tours to Nicaragua, playing baseball with campesino teams and distributing baseball equipment throughout the countryside.

Jay is a widely published writer. He is the author of When the Mississippi Ran Backwards: Empire, Intrigue, Murder, and the New Madrid Earthquakes (Free Press, 2005), Suitcase Sefton and the American Dream (Triumph Books, 2006), Manufacturing Hysteria: A History of Scapegoating, Surveillance, and Secrecy in Modern America (Pantheon, 2011), and Hitting: An Official Major League Baseball Book (Simon & Schuster, 1991). His articles have appeared in Smithsonian, Newsweek, Sports Illustrated, The New York Times, Gourmet, Whole Earth Review, and a broad variety of other national, regional and local publications. A number of his pieces have been anthologized. He has also written for television (the highly acclaimed but short-lived CBS series Brooklyn Bridge) and the stage (A Loud Noise in a Public Place).