John Briggs
John P. Briggs is Professor in the Department of English Language, Comparative Literature and Writing at Western and the Professional Writing Coordinator. He is the fiction editor of Connecticut Review. He is one of three CSU Distinguished Professors named at Western.
He started his writing career in newspapers, working first for his hometown newspaper, The Tarrytown Daily News. He later did stints at The Hartford Courant as police reporter, general assignment reporter and copy editor. He also spent several years as the managing editor of a publication for The American Academy of Psychoanalysis and doing public relations and report editing for a hospital consulting firm. He was a professional photographer for several years in New York. He has taught at The New School for Social Research and Mercy College.
Dr. Briggs' published books include Trickster Tales published in 2005 by Fine Tooth Press; Entangled Landscapes: Stories and Poems about the Mind in Nature, coauthored with James R. Scrimgeour; HarperCollins' The Seven Life Lessons of Chaos, 1999, coauthored with physicist F. David Peat. He authored Fractals: The Patterns of Chaos, Simon & Schuster, Touchstone, 1992, selected by the Quality Paperback Book Club and the McGraw-Hill Book Club.
His first book about chaos, Turbulent Mirror, HarperCollins, 1989, also coauthored with Peat, has been translated into French, German, Korean, Spanish, Japanese, Italian and Greek. It sold 100,000 copies in its German edition. It was a selection for Book of the Month Club, Macmillan Book Club and Quality Paperback Book Club. His other books are:
Fire in the Crucible: The Alchemy of Creative Genius. St. Martin's Press, 1988; paperback edition by Jeremy Tarcher (Putnam), 1989, recently reissued by Phanes Press in fall 2000.
Metaphor: The Logic of Poetry, A Handbook, Pace University Press, 1990, coauthored with Richard Monaco, a revised edition of a text originally published by McGraw-Hill in 1974.
Looking Glass Universe, Simon & Schuster, 1984, coauthored with Peat and published in French, Japanese, Italian, Spanish and British editions. A Science Book Club selection.
He received his doctorate in Aesthetics and Psychology from The Union Institute and University in 1981. He has a masters in literature from NYU and a B.A. from Wesleyan University.
His articles and interviews have appeared in Omni, Artnews, New Age Journal and Science Digest, among others.
He has also published fiction and poetry in The Iowa Review, Prairie Schooner, Northwest Review, Parting Gifts, Pudding Magazine, Art Times, New Novel Review and others. A recent issue of River Oak Review featured several of his fractal dream stories and a lengthy interview about the relation of science and literature.
Professor Briggs has been a selectman and police officer in his home town of Granville, Massachusetts.
