John Lauricella

John Lauricella was born in Brooklyn, New York, and grew up in Scotch Plains, New Jersey, where he attended the public schools. He studied fiction-writing with Frederick Busch at Colgate University, was elected to Phi Beta Kappa, and graduated magna cum laude. Later, he earned an M.F.A. in creative writing and a Ph.D. in English at Cornell University. He is the author of Home Games: Essays on Baseball Fiction (McFarland & Company, 1999), and chapters of that book have been reprinted in Contemporary American Authors (Gale Research) and Twentieth Century Literary Criticism (Gale/Cengage Learning). Lauricella has published short fiction in Arts & Letters: A Journal of Contemporary Culture, and Stone Canoe: A Journal of Arts, Literature, and Social Commentary. He is the author of the novels Hunting Old Sammie; 2094; and The Pornographer’s Apprentice. He was brave (and foolish) enough to publish those novels himself, without publicity, promotion, or marketing support. His short fiction has appeared in The Piltdown Review, Stone Canoe, and Arts & Letters. The manuscript of his most recent novel, "Unforgettable," is under review. His work-in-progress is a novel about two Americans whose working vacation in the People’s Republic of China at the outset of a trade war makes them unwitting pawns in simultaneous counterintelligence gambits run by the C.I.A. and the Ministry of State Security. He has taught fiction-writing, expository writing, and personal essay writing (as well as courses in the American novel, British modernism, and the poetry and prose of Renaissance England) at several colleges and universities. Other episodes of past meager gainful employment include stints as a library archivist, golf caddie, commercial freelance writer, proofreader, and copy-editor. Having briefly escaped New York’s Central Southern Tier once his schooling ended, Lauricella was recaptured and returned to Ithaca, NY, where he lives to this day, a stranger in a strange land.