MJ Deery

For six great years, I was the lead writer for GapKids and the men's brand, responsible for seasonal concepting, homepages, directories, consumer emails, and fashion blog posts...and the photo team would occasionally humor me and implement a few of my ideas on photo shoots.

Amidst the din of Street Fighter battles being fought in the studio's lounge, I worked on emails, online advertising, and Times Square electronic jumbotrons for Juicy Fruit, Winterfresh, and Sybase.

This was where I cut my teeth, both in advertising and in agency life. I will always look back on this job as one of the most fulfilling of my career. Not because it's where I met my current partner, the visual genius Jen Kellogg, and not because it was the height of the dot-com boom and we were getting full-body massages and sushi made fresh on the cocktail tables in our front lobby...actually, yes, it is because of those things. But also, we did great work at that agency. We had big-name clients to answer to, so there was a good amount at stake, but we also had our own internal compass, which always took us past where we were supposed to stop.

I was hired right out of grad school to write for the Dockers International Film Festival. But within the first week of work, I saw what else could be written/rewritten for the brand, and within a year, I was transferred to Dockers' creative agency, CKS and Partners.

• Cannes Lions International
• One Show Interactive Merit
• One Show Interactive Silver
• One Show Interactive Bronze
• Communication Arts
• New England Writers' Award, 1998

• Limos.com, San Francisco, CA
• Silverlign, San Jose, CA
• Smashing Ideas, Seattle, WA
• Jumbo Shrimp, San Francisco, CA
• Clear Channel, San Francisco, CA
• Mekanism, San Francisco, CA
• Dockers, San Francisco, CA
• Extreme Pizza, San Francisco, CA

• Art Center, Impact & Clarity in Advertising, instructor Bryan Birch, San Francisco, CA, 2003
• MFA in creative writing, Emerson College, Boston, MA, 1996-1998
• BA in English & American literature, Hartwick College, Oneonta, NY, 1990-1994

• Ashby Avenue Writers' Collective, Berkeley, CA, 1999-2009
• Scholarship Recipient, Squaw Valley Community of Writers, Lake Tahoe, CA, 1998
• Ploughshares International Writers' Conference, The Netherlands, 1997

• Concepts
• Branding
• Narratives
• Headlines
• Body Copy
• Articles
• Blog Posts
• Social Media Strategy