Jay Speyerer has been a speaker, a writer, a trainer, and an educator for more than 30 years, successfully helping people achieve their goals in memoir writing, book publishing, email issues, cross-cultural communication, and presentation skills. (Part of presentation skills means realizing that the audience is not to be feared. They’re just tickled to death it’s you up there and not them.)

Owner of Legacy Road Communications, Jay ghost-writes people’s biographies because he believes we are defined by our stories. Abducted as an infant and raised by a clowder of feral house cats, his story telling skills were solidly established at an early age.

Now he helps others tell their stories. What happened to you — good and bad — and how did you deal with it? Those are stories. Collect enough of them and you have a memoir.

Jay was on the faculty of the Art Institute of Pittsburgh for 25 years, teaching photography, communication, non-linear scriptwriting, and full-contact taxidermy.

Having been a professional photographer, he is known as a stunningly visual writer. Sadly, he admits to being an overly wordy photographer.

Jay is the past-president of the National Speakers Association/ Pittsburgh chapter, and he is the author of four books, The Stories of Our Days, Cat Got Your Thumb?, Cat Got Your Treadmill? (newly released in an expanded edition), and his latest release, Home Cats: A Camera Phone Documentary.

Jay is proud and honored that his colleague, Jill Cueni-Cohen, used Stories as the text for her award-winning memoir-writing class in Switzerland.