Lester Eugene Mayers

Director • Writer • Performance Artist • Playwright • Dramaturg • Choreographer • Educator

Lester Eugene Mayers, a proud Brooklyn native, is an accomplished member of the Department of Theatre Arts at SUNY New Paltz and an MFA graduate of the renowned Jack Kerouac School of Disembodied Poetics. A multi-hyphenate artist whose work spans directing, writing, performance, choreography, and dramaturgy, he currently serves on the faculties of Ramapo College and the Minneapolis College of Art and Design. In 2023, he was honored as the inaugural Artist in Residence at Ramapo College.

In spring 2024, Mayers released his debut studio poetry album, Exile: The Final Love Poem, a milestone commemorated with a live concert at SoMad and an accompanying poetic lookbook—marking his intentional farewell to institutionalized poetic exploration. On World AIDS Day 2025, he published Tomorrow 12:01, a docu-poetic collection honoring over one hundred stories of people surviving or affected by HIV.

Mayers has performed, taught, and facilitated at numerous universities, theaters, and cultural institutions, including Ramapo College, MCAD, The Guthrie Theater, The Playwrights’ Center, SUNY New Paltz, Pace University, Delta State University, Nuyorican Poets Café, Denizen Theatre, and Unframed Artist Gallery, with additional workshops and readings hosted virtually.

His first book, 100 Poems for 100 Voices, sparked a sold-out poetry tour and an album now streaming on iTunes, Spotify, and Tidal. The book earned four awards—including the Visionary Award from the National Advancement of Colored Women Organization—and two New York State proclamations. His second poetry collection, African Booty Scratcha, debuted in 2019, followed by the critical work A Spring of Gay-Black-Feminine Joy (2021). That same year, he released a highly anticipated visual archive, Love Lessons With Lester, with SoMad.NYC, and later returned for a four-night sold-out sex-poetry concert, New Dream of Love, in December 2022.

In July 2022, he completed an Artist Residency at The Playwrights’ Center, where he wrote and developed three new plays. His work also appears in Between Certain Death and a Possible Future, featured on “most anticipated” lists in The New York Times, Oprah Daily, The Millions, and The Rumpus.

Mayers’ most recent book before Tomorrow 12:01—the 2023 sex choreopoem Swallow From Both Ends—received an endorsement from the National Playwrights Conference at the Eugene O’Neill Theater Center. Known for his fearless approach to story, Mayers—self-defined as “a storyteller who goes where the story is”—writes at the intersections of Blackness, queerness, intimacy, and embodied truth.

His work has been published by NYU Press, Arsenal Pulp Press, Chronogram, the Sojourner Truth Library, Boulder Weekly, and I Am From Driftwood LGBTQ archive.

__________________________________________________

“I don’t write from a distance. I don’t write for perfection. I don’t write for the institution. I write through feelings for what was, is, soon to be and will forever remain.”

-Lester Mayers.