John Middleton was born in San Francisco and raised in Kansas City. He received his B.A. in English and History at the University of Kansas and his PhD in English from Indiana University with a dissertation on Moby Dick. He was an assistant professor of English at Georgia State University, Atlanta, where he specialized in American Literature and where he received a fellowship from the National Endowment for the Humanities. He currently lives near New Bedford, Massachusetts, where after pursuing a career in sales and marketing, he retired from business and earned an MFA in artisanry from the University of Massachusetts/Dartmouth.