John Timpane

John Timpane has a B.A. with Honors in Humanities from the University of California at Irvine (1975) an M.A. and Ph.D. in English and another Ph.D. in Humanities from Stanford University in 1981. He also (1978) was honored with the American Academy of Poets Prize at Stanford. He has written verses since he was a little guy, and he has published a little bit, including two chapbooks: Burning Bush (Ontario, Canada: Judith Fitzgerald/Crabtree Press, 2010) and Buck in the Piano Room (Philadelphia: Moonstone Arts, 2023).

From 1981-1997 John was a professor and lecturer in English, first at Rutgers University and later at Lafayette College in Pennsylvania. In 1984 he taught non-Shakespearean Renaissance drama at Southampton University in England on a Fulbright Fellowship. With Nancy H. Packer, he wrote and published a college composition textbook, Writing Worth Reading (NY: St. Martin, 1984-1996), and under his own name he published a book about poetry, It Could Be Verse (Berkeley, Calif.: Ten Speed, 1995). He also published academic essays on Shakespeare, Tennessee Williams, Ntozake Shange, August Wilson, and comic theory.

Since his high-school days, John has been a freelance writer in the sciences and the humanities, publishing opinion pieces, ghostwriting books, and working as writing coach at newspapers and businesses. In 1997, one of his clients, The Philadelphia Inquirer, hired him as Opinion Page Editor. He edited and wrote opinion pieces from 1997-2008, when he became a Media Writer at the Inquirer, and later the Books Editor and Theater Critic. He retired from The Inquirer in 2019. Among the honors garnered in two decades of journalism were the 2000 James K. Batten Award for Excellence in Civic Journalism from the Pew Center for Civic Journalism and, in 2005, the Templeton-Cambridge Fellowship in Science and Religion at the University of Cambridge.

In 2000 he managed to publish two books: (with Maureen Watts and the Poetry Center at San Francisco State University) Poetry for Dummies (NY: Hungry Minds), and (with Roland Reisley) Usonia, NY: Building a Community with Frank Lloyd Wright (NY: Princeton Architectural Press). In 2026, his second edition of Poetry for Dummies appeared.

Since The Inquirer, John has freelanced fulltime. He specializes in ghostwriting autobiographies; arts reviewing, especially in poetry and theater; and writing seminars. He keeps working at the craft of versemaking. He’s also a flutist and bassist in the virtual musical consortium Car Radio Dog. John lives in central New Jersey with his spouse, Maria-Christina Keller, copy director at Scientific American. They have two children and two granddaughters.