Glen Cantrell is an organizational strategy consultant and small-town civic leader based in Twain Harte, California. More recently, and somewhat to everyone’s surprise, he has also become an author. He spent twenty years building and leading software development teams and processes at companies including HP and Oracle, a dizzying number of startups, and, for good karma, a nonprofit or two. He now works with state and local government agencies developing organizational strategy and improving technology delivery.

His first book, Embracing the Local: Extension Cords and All, grew out of his accidental tenure as president of an all-volunteer Chamber of Commerce and became a memoir about small towns, volunteerism, belonging, institutional fragility, and the people who quietly hold places together.

He also writes essays about the places where ideas collide with ordinary life, moving between history, books, institutions, community, and his own experience. His subjects have ranged from Enlightenment philosophers and his emerging understanding of the strange machinery of publishing to volunteer burnout, small-town leadership, belonging, and the occasional small-town controversy. He is particularly interested in systems built by human beings, the assumptions hiding inside them, and what happens when reality refuses to cooperate with the theory.

Glen lives in Twain Harte with his husband, Michael, and their three dogs, all of whom are considerably less impressed by his mid-life writing crisis than he is.