J. P. Jones

J. P. (Philip) Jones grew up in what was a prosperous small city that has since lost both population and businesses and become another depressed part of America's "rust bowl." He now lives in the Washington, DC metro area. He attended Brown University, then joined the Peace Corps and taught English for two years in Tunis. Years later, he returned to Tunis to research how the city had changed prior to writing his first novel, "A Witness in Tunis," which describes an American caught up in the machinations of the police state that was overthrown in the Arab Spring of 2010. After the Peace Corps, he worked as a book editor for a small publishing company in New York city that was allied with the New Republic magazine. He edited both fiction and books about the Vietnam war. He then moved to Washington where he initially worked as a writer/researcher about the effects of an aging society on county governments. After a few years he switched from writing about services for the elderly to telecommunications. He became a consultant to the Department of Energy's office of telecommunications. Next he joined a major corporation that provided telecommunications services to NASA. At several points in his life, he has lived in France and Italy and has traveled throughout Europe as well as parts of the (former) Soviet Union, Japan, China, and the Middle East. He only began writing fiction in his early forties and has written five novels: "A Witness in Tunis," "Convictions," "A Sense of Loss," "Long After the War," and "Damaged Lives." His intention in his novels has been to write about "people who no one else is writing about." He usually places such characters in ambiguous situations that involve a crime. Sometimes the story is narrated by a character investigating a crime, sometimes by someone who has committed a crime, and sometimes by a person who is put on trial for a crime. In all these stories, the situation is complex and the ethics are ambiguous. Finally, while Mr. Jones has a normal interest in politics, he believes that politics usually make bad fiction. He can be reached at jpjauthor@hotmail.com or, on facebook, at JP Jones.