John P Warnock

Professor, Emeritus

John Warnock started teaching English at the University of Wyoming in 1970. Over the next twenty years, he directed the composition program, the Wyoming Writing Project, the UW Writing Center, the Rhetoric Institute and the seminal Wyoming Conference on Freshman and Sophomore English. In 1991, he and Tilly Warnock came to the University of Arizona where he worked with the University Composition Board and directed the Ph.D. program in Rhetoric, Composition, and the Teaching of English. In his years at Arizona, he for several summers taught writing workshops for judges with the Canadian Institute for the Administration of Justice, and for fifteen summers taught for the Bread Loaf School of English at campuses in Middlebury, Vermont; Santa Fe, New Mexico; Juneau, Alaska; and Asheville, North Carolina. He gave his first paper at the 4C’s in 1973, entitled “Who’s Afraid of Theory,” and since that time has published essays on a wide range of issues pertinent to the emerging field of Rhetoric and Composition. In 1989, he published Representing Reality: Readings in Literary Nonfiction (St. Martins Press) and in 2003 Effective Writing: A Handbook with Stories for Lawyers (Parlor Press). With Michael Moore, he is co-founder and co-editor of the national award-winning Community Literacy Journal.