John Weagly was born in Baltimore, Maryland. At the age of four, his family moved to Quincy, Illinois, located on the banks of the Mississippi River. This is where many of his short stories take place (although, in the stories, Quincy is called Currie Valley). Nothing much happened for a while. Then, in high school, John became an actor. Being on the stage made everything else tolerable. Plays. Musicals. Concert, Show and Swing Choirs. With some friends, he formed GeekShow, a comedy group that performed skits at Quincy Senior High's New Faces talent show.He realized that a lot of things would come and go in life: friends, jobs, girlfriends, but theater would always be there. It would be constant.After graduation, John went from Quincy to Carbondale to attend Southern Illinois University. More acting. More plays. More comedy. While he'd hated high school, John loved college. His interest in theater evolved and he started directing plays. It was even better than acting! John graduated with a BA in Theater. After college, he toured as a writer/performer with "Authorized Personnel: A Comedy and Improv Team". AP hit a lot of places between the Mississippi River and the eastern seaboard (Illinois, Ohio, Indiana, Pennsylvania, Maryland, West Virginia). While John wasn't on the road, he had the worst job in the world working as a baby photographer. This was all in Bloomington, Indiana, where AP had its headquarters, and Bloomington, Indiana is where John started to take an interest in playwriting. Authorized Personnel split up in 1991, but John stayed in Bloomington to try his luck at other ventures. He wanted to direct at the Bloomington Playwrights Project and a logical way to get his foot in the door was to take one of their playwriting classes. It worked. John got to direct, but he also wrote a couple of plays and discovered that he enjoyed the writing process. In 1992, the Playwrights Project did a one-act John wrote called "Dr. Goat: Goat Doctor". It was the first play he ever had produced. While in Bloomington, in addition to being a playwright, a director, a comedian and a baby photographer, John also did more acting, he worked at a pizza restaurant, he was a circus clown and he started his own theater company, Iguana Productions. In 1993 John figured he'd accomplished everything he wanted to accomplish in Bloomington. He'd always talked about living in Chicago, it seemed like a fine time to make the move.In the Windy City John continued writing plays. He produced and directed some stuff with Iguana Productions. He found work in more theater Box Offices than he'd care to remember. In 1998, he started to split his focus between writing plays and writing fiction and one year later his story "The Redemption of Tyler Jack" was published in Pirate Writings Magazine. It was John's first professional fiction sale.John has had many more stories published since then and he's had many more plays produced. His work has been called "exuberant" and "charming" and "appealingly quirky." His plays have been produced around the world and his fiction has been translated into several languages. He's been nominated for a Spinetingler Award, been nominated for a Derringer Award five times (winning one in 2008) and has received Honorable Mention in "The Year's Best Fantasy and Horror."