John Temple

John Temple is the author of the forthcoming Up In Arms: How The Bundy Family Hijacked Public Lands, Outfoxed the Federal Government, and Ignited America’s Patriot Militia Movement (June 2019). Up in Arms chronicles how an isolated family of desert-dwelling Mormons became the guiding light—and then the outright leaders—of the Patriot movement. This behind-the-scenes accounts gives readers an unprecedented and objective look at the real people and families at the heart of the highly publicized 2014 Nevada standoff and the 2016 takeover of the Malheur Wildlife Refuge in Oregon.

John is also the author American Pain: How a Young Felon and His Ring of Doctors Unleashed America’s Deadliest Drug Epidemic, which explores how two young felons built the largest painkiller distribution ring in the United States and also explains the massive rise in the use and abuse of narcotic painkillers over the past two decades. American Pain was named a New York Post “Favorite Book of 2015” and is a 2016 Edgar Allan Poe Award nominee in the Fact Crime category.

Temple, a tenured journalism professor at West Virginia University, also wrote two previous nonfiction books: The Last Lawyer: The Fight to Save Death Row Inmates (2009) and Deadhouse: Life in a Coroner’s Office (2005). In 2010, The Last Lawyer won the Scribes Book Award from the American Society of Legal Writers.

Prior to teaching at WVU, Temple taught and studied creative nonfiction writing at the University of Pittsburgh, where he earned an M.F.A. Temple worked in the newspaper business for six years. He was the health/education reporter for the Pittsburgh Tribune-Review, a general assignment reporter for the News & Record in Greensboro, N.C., and a government and politics reporter for the Tampa Tribune in Tampa, Florida.

For more about John and his works, go to http://johntemplebooks.com/