John Warner

John Warner is a novelist, columnist, and humorist. His first book, My First Presidentiary: A Scrapbook of George W. Bush (co-authored with Kevin Guilfoile), was written primarily in colored pencil and became a Washington Post no. 1 best seller. Since then, he has published a parody of writing advice, more politically minded humor, a novel, and a collection of short stories. From 2003 to 2008, he edited McSweeney’s Internet Tendency, for which he now serves as a contributing editor, and writes a weekly column for the Chicago Tribune on books and reading.

Since 2000, Warner has held a series of teaching positions at the University of Illinois, Virginia Tech, Clemson, and the College of Charleston, experiences that he mines for his Just Visiting blog at Inside Higher Ed. His writing for Inside Higher Ed has resulted in two forthcoming books on the teaching of writing: Why Can’t They Write?: Killing the Five-Paragraph Essay and Other Necessities (Johns Hopkins Univerity Press), and the tentatively titled Not a Writing Textbook: Experiences for the Developing Writer (Penguin/Random House).