Timothy Mason has been actively performing poetry and promoting folk music since the 1980′s. He honed his performance style in the early poetry slams, the underground coffeehouse scene of Cambridge, MA, and around the campfires of the fabled Kerrville Folk Festival.

An extensive background in human services, three years volunteering for a telephone crisis intervention hotline, training as a rape crisis counselor, four years working with developmentally disabled adults, a stint with court-involved youth, and eight years volunteering in a battered women’s shelter have given him a unique empathy with the quiet battles of daily survival.

He was born in the Midwest and raised in North America, and recently relocated to rural Northern New Mexico. His family eventually settled in Salt Lake City, Utah, which he still calls home, although he spent almost four decades in New England. On the east side of the Big River, he has called Worcester, Cambridge, and South Boston, MA home, and after a few bi-coastal years commuting to Richmond, CA, he returned to Cambridge, MA, where he continues to maintain a base. He supports himself by providing bookkeeping services, tax preparation, and consultations to independent artists and arts-oriented small businesses. He is also coordinating The Old Vienna Legacy Project.

Over his 30 plus years presenting folk music to New England audiences his work has included reviving Club Passim, the legendary Harvard Square coffeehouse that began as Club 47, pioneering new audiences at Capo’s in Lowell MA and bringing The Old Vienna Kaffeehaus in Westboro, Massachusetts, to national prominence.

As an undergraduate at The University of Utah, he chaired the student committee responsible for bringing The Rocky Horror Picture Show to the big screen behind “the Zion curtain”. Mason later attended graduate school at Antioch New England in Keene, New Hampshire, earning a Master’s degree in Organization and Management. He was voted “Most Standardly Deviated” and “Most Ambiguous”. He thought it best to avoid the corporate world. Thus far he has achieved this goal.

His poetry is drawn from his diverse experiences and is written to be performed aloud. He has collaborated with musicians on a number of occasions, including recording the cassette single Saddam’s Insane with prize-winning guitarist Geoff Bartley. Saddam’s Insane aired on National Public Radio’s HEAT show at the onset of the Gulf War. His work with Bartley has been followed with two full-length CDs.

His self-published Feral Voices in February 2009 is a full-length, 94-page collection of poetry giving a non-human voice and sensibility to the 21st-century experience on our shared planet. It marked a return to the page for a poet whose emphasis is on performance and complements his work from the late 1990s.

His first book, Gently, Like Water, Cracking Stone, was released in April 1997. The 50-page perfect-bound volume includes a CD of live performance. Introduced by social activist Barry Crimmins, this volume opened many doors, and its innovative presentation has caught the attention of many artists and audiences alike.1998 saw the release of the CD “Bloodlines,” which features music by award-winning musician Geoff Bartley. A follow-up collaboration, “Bones and Breath,” came in 2003, where they continue to break new, dynamic ground, combining song and poem into seamless new creations. This approach to collaboration is currently being explored with Alaska musician Tom Begich as the duo Bone Collectors.

Mason has demonstrated his performing versatility in multiple appearances with the WPI Jazz Department, working with the full big band and smaller ensembles in pops concert settings and in the 2008 Ottawa Folk Festival Cross Cultural Collaboration where he combined his poetry with the music of The Carolina Chocolate Drops, Jaxson Haldine, James Hill, Radslov Lorkavich, Anne Davidson and others in a performance recorded by the CBC.

From Anchorage, Toronto and Ottawa to Boston, Austin and Oakland, festival and club appearances have solidified his place among contemporary New England artists and international audiences.

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