Who Is John Gillespie?
John M. Gillespie is a writer, teacher, and lifelong student of the questions that make us human.
His writing lives at the intersection of literature, history, philosophy, and faith. He is particularly interested in the ways writers help us understand ourselves: who we are, how we become who we are, and what it means to live an authentic life.
Much of John’s recent work has centered on Thomas Merton, the twentieth-century American writer, poet, and contemplative. John’s forthcoming book, A Poet’s Heart: Thomas Merton, Poetry, and the Discovery of the True Self, explores how poetry shaped Merton’s understanding of identity and his lifelong search for what he called the true self.
But Merton is only one part of a much larger conversation. John has written about writers ranging from Emily Dickinson and C.S. Lewis to Rainer Maria Rilke, T.S. Eliot, Herman Melville, Ray Bradbury, and Henry David Thoreau. Across these very different voices, he keeps returning to questions of identity, solitude, language, love, belief, and what it means to see the world differently.
John is a Distinguished Professor of History and Humanities at San Jacinto College in Houston, Texas, where he has spent more than a decade teaching history, literature, philosophy, and the humanities. He holds a Ph.D. in Humanities with a concentration in Literature, along with graduate degrees in History and Curriculum and Instruction.
For John, the humanities are not simply an academic subject. They are a conversation that has been going on for centuries, and we are all invited to join it.
His goal as a writer is simple: to keep that conversation going, to ask meaningful questions, and to help readers discover something new about the writers they love, the world they inhabit, and perhaps themselves.
