Jon Michael Riley

Born in Lowell, Massachusetts and as a young child moved to North Carolina where Jon and his family lived in small mill towns. There he enjoyed a particularly schizophrenic childhood with heated white supremacy at school and elsewhere, while his home life was filled with books, interesting conversation, and a wide-­‐horizon view of the world.

After graduating from the Atlanta College of Art, he and his wife Catherine lived and studied in Paris on a French Government Scholarship. A year later Jon returned to attend New York University’s Graduate Institute of Film and Television.

He subsequently worked his way—with help and encouragement from Catherine—into being a New York studio and location photographer of considerable reputation, straddling that delicate line between commercial, client-­‐based work, and art photography. His wide range of clients included IBM, AT&T, Audi, Elizabeth Arden, Canon, Coca-­‐Cola, FedEx, Marshall Amps, and a number of banks and investment firms. Rizzoli published his first book on Ireland, entitled The Irish File-­ Images from a Land of Grace.

Because of a serious back injury, Jon backed away from the physical rigors of high-­‐end photography and began to write, attend writers’ workshops and conferences.

Dream the Dawn is Jon’s second novel and the first in a Channey Moran series. Up next is the second in that series, entitled Photo Shoot, a story where the photographer, Channey Moran, goes to Somalia to help rescue some good people from bad-­‐boy pirates.

On the back burner is an image book on all the sacred things and places in Ireland, a place Jon has lived in, studied and knows well. The working title is Spirit and Remembrance-­ The Sacred Ireland. With most principle photography completed, all it really needs is a good publisher.

Jon lives in a quiet mountain cove outside of Asheville, North Carolina.