John Warner is a writer, editor, speaker, teacher, and consultant whose first book (My First Presidentiary: A Scrapbook of George W. Bush co-authored with Kevin Guilfoile) was written primarily in colored pencil and turned into a Washington Post #1 best seller. Since then he’s published a parody of writing advice (Fondling Your Muse: Infallible Advice from a Published Author to a Writerly Aspirant), more politically minded humor (So You Want to Be President?), a novel (The Funny Man), and a collection of short stories (Tough Day for the Army). From 2003 to 2008 he edited McSweeney’s Internet Tendency for which he now serves as a contributing editor, and he writes a weekly column for the Chicago Tribune on books and reading as his alter ego, The Biblioracle.
Since 2001 he’s held a series of teaching positions at four different institutions, the University of Illinois Urbana-Champaign, Virginia Tech, Clemson University and College of Charleston, where he currently holds the title of faculty affiliate. John has been the instructor of record for courses in fiction writing, first-year writing, technical writing, humor writing, narrative non-fiction writing, American literature, contemporary fiction, the literature of American humor, as well as communication studies, communication skills, and public speaking.
John writes the Just Visiting blog at Inside Higher Ed where he has become a national voice on issues of faculty labor and writing pedagogy. His writing for IHE has resulted in his two most recent books on the teaching of writing, Why They Can’t Write: Killing the Five-Paragraph Essay and Other Necessities (Johns Hopkins UP) and The Writer’s Practice: Building Confidence in Your Nonfiction Writing (Penguin/Random House).