John Warner is a national voice on the teaching of writing, faculty labor, and institutional values, both as a frequent speaker, and a longtime contributor to Inside Higher Ed where his “Just Visiting” column has run weekly over ten years. He is also the author of Why They Can’t Write: Killing the Five-Paragraph Essay and Other Necessities (Johns Hopkins UP), The Writer’s Practice: Building Confidence in Your Nonfiction Writing (Penguin), and Sustainable. Resilient. Free.: The Future of Public Higher Education (Belt).

A former college instructor with 20 years of experience across multiple institutions (University of Illinois, Virginia Tech, Clemson, College of Charleston), Warner now works as a writer, editor, speaker and consultant. In addition to his work in education, for over a decade he’s been a weekly columnist for the Chicago Tribune, writing about books and the habits of reading as his alter ego, “The Biblioracle.” In 2021 he started an associated Substack newsletter, The Biblioracle Recommends, which was a Substack Featured Publication for 2021.

Warner is the other of five other books, including the Washington Post #1 best seller, My First Presidentiary: A Scrapbook of George W. Bush (Crown, co-authored with Kevin Guilfoile), a parody of writing advice books, Fondling Your Muse: Infallible Advice from a Published Author to the Writerly Aspirant (Writer’s Digest), a novel, The Funny Man (Soho), and a collection of short stories (Tough Day for the Army (LSU Press). His fiction, humor, essays and commentary have been published in dozens of outlets including Slate, The Washington Post, and Salon.

From 2005 until 2009 he was editor of the McSweeney’s website (mcsweeneys.net), winning two Webby awards in the process. He continues an association as an editor-at-large for the site.

Every year he joins his friend Kevin Guilfoile in the commentary booth for The Morning News Tournament of Books, an annual March Madness tournament to find the “best” work of fiction in a given year.

A native of Chicago, Warner lives with his veterinarian wife Kathy in the Charleston, SC area. He is a faculty affiliate at the College of Charleston.