Jay Bryan established the position of Poet Laureate for Carrboro, North Carolina. For fifteen years, he coordinated poetry readings on Carrboro Day, the town’s celebration of its residents and their gifts. He compiled and edited the Carrboro 100th Birthday Poetry Anthology, published in May 2011.

In 1994, he published Haiku for Carroll, a book of haiku written for his first wife during her terminal illness. In 2013, his Selected Poems was published by Finishing Line Press. His poems have appeared in Blink, the Ecozoic Reader, Cowboy Poetry, and they wrote us a poem (from the Duke Univ. Health Arts Network)