About the Author

Jason Trama is the author of Annin Street and The Quiet. He holds a PhD in the biomedical sciences. His fiction explores memory, belief, and the distance between what people experience and what they can explain.

He lives in Cream Ridge, New Jersey.

Annin Street

Jason was raised on the stories that became Annin Street, his first novel. At fifty-three, he wrote it over many weekends at his mother’s kitchen table, asking about her childhood on a South Philadelphia block and her years in the count rooms of Atlantic City’s first casinos, while asking was still possible. He realized his mother was a respectable badass and had to tell her story.

The memories are real. Much of the world built around them is invention. Some afternoons his mother corrected the book, and the corrections went in. Its last line is addressed to every reader with a parent, a grandparent, an aunt at the far end of the table: Ask yours now.

The Quiet

The Quiet explores the space between experience and understanding. Drawing on research into attention, perception, and memory, the novel asks what happens when an experience feels certain but its explanation does not.

Its characters want answers. They also want to be heard, trusted, and believed. Those needs do not always lead them toward the same answer.

Talks and appearances

Jason is available for readings, book clubs, and library programs—in person in New Jersey and Philadelphia, or by video anywhere. Topics include turning family memories into fiction, writing a parent’s story while asking is still possible, and bringing scientific research into a novel without closing off its mysteries. He also welcomes invitations from Italian-American heritage groups.