John Griesemer Biography

John Griesemer was born in 1947 and raised in Westfield, New Jersey. He graduated from Dickinson College, and from 1970-72 served as an infantry rifleman and journalist in the U.S. Army.  In the years following, he worked as a freelance journalist, a mental hospital orderly, and a deckhand on a salmon fishing boat. In 1973, he landed a job as a reporter at a daily newspaper in Western New Hampshire. While in New Hampshire, he wrote a story on a local theatre company, auditioned for the role of the telegraph boy in their production of Thornton Wilder's The Skin of Our Teeth, and went on to become a full-time actor.

In New York, he appeared on Broadway with Spalding Gray and George C. Scott, off-Broadway in plays by Sam Shepard and Shakespeare, in such motion pictures as Malcolm X, Eight Men Out, Days of Thunder, and The Crucible, and on television in Law & Order.

While acting, Griesemer began writing and publishing fiction in literary journals such as Glimmer Train, The Gettysburg Review, Three Penny Review, and Boulevard.  In 2000, he published his debut novel, No One Thinks of Greenland, a book Esquire magazine called "that rarest of first-novel achievements: an across-the-board success." His second novel, Signal and Noise, was published in 2004. For the last 14 years, Griesemer has lived in Lyme, New Hampshire, with his wife and two children.

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