About
John Enright was born in Buffalo, New York, in 1945. After serving stints in semi-pro baseball and the Lackawanna steel mills, he earned his degree from City College of New York while working full-time at Fortune, Time, and Newsweek magazines. He later completed a master’s degree in folklore at UC-Berkeley, before devoting the 1970s to the publishing industry in New York, San Francisco, and Hong Kong. In 1981, he left the United States to teach at the American Samoa Community College. He spent the next twenty-six years living on the islands of the South Pacific, working for environmental, cultural, and historical resource preservation. Over the past four decades, his essays, articles, short stories, and poems have appeared in more than seventy books, anthologies, journals, periodicals, and online magazines. His collection of poems from Samoa, 14 Degrees South, won the University of the South Pacific Press’s inaugural International Literature Competition. In the past four years he has published four novels in the acclaimed Jungle Beat series of detective novels (Thomas & Mercer) set in American Samoa and has started a fresh novel series, the Dominick Chronicles (Yucca/Skyhorse).
Featured Work
The Jungle Beat Mystery Series
A Samoan-set series featuring police officer Apelu Soifua: “Enright’s portrait of cultural collision is the heart of this engaging series debut.” —Booklist
Other Works
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The Coast
2024
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New Jerusalem News
2015