Alumnus of the Year 2018
After graduating from OHS, John attended Chico State College; he went from there to UCLA, where he received his B.A. in 1971. After that he went to UC Davis, where he earned an M.A. in 1974 and a Ph.D. in 1980. For these degrees, all in English, he studied British and American literature, eventually specializing in literature of the American West and writing his doctoral dissertation on the classic western novel. During that time he had part-time and limited-term teaching positions at Solano College, Yuba College, Sacramento State University, UC Santa Barbara, and UC Davis.
John lives in the plains country of eastern Wyoming with his wife, Rocio, and their son, Dimitri. He has been a full-time faculty member at Eastern Wyoming College in Torrington, Wyoming since 1981, teaching courses in basic writing, composition, introduction to literature, the short story, Western American literature, creative writing, all on a regular basis. During his university years he studied Spanish and French, and in 1988 he took a semester’s leave to study Spanish at the University of Wyoming. Since then he has taught Spanish, as well. In 1994 he went to Saltillo, Coahuila, Mexico, where he earned a diploma in Spanish philology from the Instituto de Filologia. In that same year, he won an award for teaching excellence at Eastern Wyoming College.
From 1978 onward, he has had a wide variety of his own work published. He has also written textbooks for basic writing and college composition.
John has won many awards for his work, including two awards from the Wyoming State Historical Society (for fiction), two awards from Wyoming Writers for encouragement of other writers and service to the organization, two Wyoming Arts Council literary fellowships (one for fiction, one for non-fiction), a Will Rogers Medallion Award for Dark Prairie (a frontier mystery) and another for Thorns on the Rose (a poetry collection), a Western Writers of America Spur finalist award for his novel Raven Springs, and the Spur award itself for his short story “At the End of the Orchard” and for his novels Trouble at the Redstone and Stranger in Thunder Basin.
His most recent work consists of Field Work, a retro-noir fiction collection; Thorns on the Rose, western poetry; and Justice at Redwillow, a frontier mystery.
