Author · Storyteller · Creator
Author of ENLIGHTENMENT:
The Forgotten Genius Who Electrified America
About
Jason Orr is a novelist, storyteller and lifelong student of overlooked history. His debut novel, ENLIGHTENMENT: The Forgotten Genius Who Electrified America, is literary historical fiction inspired by the life and legacy of inventor Granville T. Woods.
His work is driven by an interest in the stories history remembers, the people it forgets, and what those choices reveal about identity, ownership, recognition, resilience and legacy.
Before publishing his first novel, Jason spent more than two decades in the financial industry. All the while, he remained a creator at heart, with interests spanning writing, music, visual storytelling, technology, history, psychology, sociology and human nature.
Through ONE Media, he works across books, music, podcasting, visual storytelling and original intellectual property, and he produces music as smooth1126. ENLIGHTENMENT marks his debut as a novelist and the beginning of a larger body of literary and creative work, with ambitions that reach beyond the page into screenwriting, filmmaking and multidisciplinary storytelling.
On storytelling
Some stories survive because history keeps telling them. Others have to be recovered: pieced back together from patents and court records, from what was credited and what quietly wasn't.
Jason is drawn to that second kind of story. Overlooked people and forgotten contributions. How memory gets made, who gets to keep it, and how technology, identity and legacy shape the world we inherit. He comes to it not as a historian but as a novelist, asking what it felt like to live inside those moments.
ENLIGHTENMENT grew out of that curiosity.
No current begins where we first notice the light.
Featured work
Debut novel · 2026
The Forgotten Genius Who Electrified America
A literary historical novel inspired by Granville T. Woods, the self-taught inventor whose work helped carry power and communication through a changing America, and who had to fight to be credited for it.
Paperback · eBook · Audiobook · Original score, The Current
Explore the BookBeyond the page
For Jason, a story doesn't have to stay on the page. His work moves between forms: a novel can carry its own score, a character can become a song, an idea can become a screenplay.
Inheritance
For Jason, questions of history and legacy aren't abstract. They are also questions of inheritance. He lives and creates alongside his family, and the work is made with them in mind.