About Me

My name is John LaPine, and I am a writer, poet, podcast producer, and educator.

After graduating from high school, I enrolled at Northern Michigan University (NMU) as an English major.  The summer after my freshman year, I started writing as an intern for a technology blog called gagagadget, where I honed my news writing/blogging skills, got more familiar with the tech world, and had the opportunity to travel to Las Vegas to cover the Consumer Electronics Show twice, in 2011 and 2012. In 2013, I started writing for The North Wind, NMU’s student newspaper, as a staff writer for the features section. There, I covered local events and wrote art reviews. Samples of my work from The North Wind can be found in the Publications section of my site.

I graduated from NMU in 2013, then re-enrolled as a graduate student in 2014 to continue my education. I taught EN 111 and 211 courses as a teaching assistant, and volunteered as an associate editor at NMU’s literary journal, Passages North, reading non-fiction and poetry, taking meeting minutes, and learning about the publishing process. It was during this time that my first poem, “Finding People Near You,” was published in a literary journal. In December 2017, I graduated from NMU with my MA in creative nonfiction and pedagogy, after completing my thesis, An Unstable Container, a collection of creative nonfiction and poetry, drawing from the genres of personal memoir and lyric essay, about growing up queer and black in rural Michigan.

My current passion project is Queer Americans, an upcoming podcast that seeks to document the lived experiences of queer-identifying Americans.

In August 2018, I began teaching English at Butte College, where I had the opportunity to instruct and interact with first-year writing students, teaching courses in composition, intro to literature, intro to poetry, and communication & critical thinking.

In the future, I would like to continue my work with literary journals, and work toward attaining my MFA or PhD, studying creative nonfiction, poetry, critical race theory, and queer theory.

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