j. isaac spradlin

About

I can't seem to keep up with this...

I'm into short fiction, soccer, social media, games, long fiction, and nonprofit communications. You can read the rest of the interest inventories and favorite books on Facebook.

I'm in arts communications, and before that I did freelance writing and reviews of Louisville visual and performing arts. I earned a master's degree in Arts Journalism in 2009 from the Newhouse School of Public Communications at Syracuse University. My final project at Syracuse, an article about Turkish artist Serkan Ozkaya's collaboration with Louisville's Courier-Journal newspaper titled "Extra! Extra! Works of Art 75 Cents" was published in the leading art journal in Istanbul. It was also collected in a book published by artwithoutwalls titled Today Could Be a Day of Historical Importance. The book is sold, amusingly, sealed inside a large sardine-style tin can.

Before grad school, I worked at Hawley-Cooke Booksellers in Louisville, Ky, and stayed on when Borders Books bought out the independent in 2003. I eventually made the jump from bookseller to supervisor, and worked as both Corporate Sales Representative and Trainer for the Gardiner Lane location on Bardstown Road. The manager recommended me to join the corporate office's Store Planning team as a Sort and Remodel Specialist in 2006. This meant travel to new stores several times a year to train new hires and management and to set up stores for business. I was selected for the group of 9 trainers who worked on the new digital concept store that opened to much fanfare and national press in Ann Arbor, Mich in 2008. Our team worked closely with corporate training experts in creating materials that were implemented nationwide, and we helped programmers determine key changes for a company-wide inventory tracking tool.

Of course, Borders was already doomed, and my colleagues in Store Planning were the first to realize how bad things were going to get. My position was eliminated in mid-2008 and I was forced to leave the company. My landing, complete with a handsome severance package, was far softer than those of people stranded at the company when it eventually liquidated.

I'm married to a wonderful woman, we have two dogs and three cats, and we live in a little house located within a 10-minute walk of five local coffeeshops, six local pizza joints, two indian restaurants, a brewpub, three liquor stores, and two Saturday farmer's markets.