Jay Karl Stevens was a freelance writer and social historian. Stevens was born and raised into a family of farmers in Springfield, Vermont. He attended school there as a child and then Kimball Union Academy in New Hampshire, going on to the University of Vermont after graduation. He is the author of Storming Heaven: LSD and the American Dream (1987), and co-author of Drumming at the Edge of Magic with Grateful Dead percussionist Mickey Hart and ethnomusicologist Fredric Lieberman. He founded Applied Orphics, a digital marketing and distribution company, and Rap Lab, a program bringing at-risk teenagers and professional musicians and poets together. Prior to his death, he was living at his family farm in Weathersfield Bow, Vermont, where he produced maple syrup.