Jon Corelis was born in California and grew up in and around Chicago, where he earned a degree in Classical Languages and Literatures at the College of the University of Chicago. He later took a doctorate in Classics at Stanford, and taught Classics and Humanities at Stanford, the University of California, and the University of Minnesota. After a subsequent career as a software specialist in Silicon Valley, he moved to Northeastern Wisconsin, where he lives with his wife, Suzanne Mills. His poetry, criticism, essays, reviews, and translations have been published in books, magazines, newspapers, and web sites in eight countries, and he has given lectures and readings by invitation in America and Europe. He recently has turned to setting his own and other poems to music.

Note: most of the songs on the playlist of this page are musical settings of poems by others or by Jon Corelisf, with various instruments simulating the vocal parts. Texts of the lyrics are available on Jon Corelis's web sit eweb site, URL below (click on the Poems, Plays, Songs, and Essays link, then on the Windows of Air link.)

Jon Corelis on his songs:

"Musicologist Robert Spencer wrote of the songs of Thomas Campion that his priorities were of the order of priority "poem, melody, and lastly singer, " and Campion himself defended the deliberate simplicity of his technique thus: 'A naked Ayre without guide, or prop, or colour but his owne, is easily censured of everies eare, and requires so much the more invention to make it please.' These comments well describe my own assumptions as a poet songwriter."