Who is John Bancroft?

     Over the course of a life as a writer, editor and publisher, John Bancroft has written about food, wine, art, theater, books, other writers, deserts and desert dwellers for magazines, newspapers and websites.
     In his infancy he traveled happily around the country as a journeyman newspaper reporter and rewrite man. At 25, when his barnstorming Toyota finally gave out in Tucson, he enrolled as a sophomore at the University of Arizona. Instead of pursuing a sensible curriculum he indulged himself in the guilty pleasure of a classic liberal education, studying a little of this and a bit of that, but mostly archaeology and Chinese literature. After graduation he worked as an editor for The University of Arizona Press.
     In 1985 he stumbled into what would prove to be an enduring passion for great restaurants when he booked a table at chef Jeremiah Tower's original Stars in San Francisco. The piece he wrote about that evening of wonders landed him a berth as Food & Wine Editor for Arizona Trend. For the statewide magazine's nearly five-year run he reviewed restaurants grand and humble and conducted an annual Golden Spoon Awards.
     After Trend, he returned to the university as editor for the Office of Arid Lands Studies, where he took the venerable print magazine The Arid Lands Newsletter digital on a GUI new network just coming to be known as the World Wide Web.
     That was a great time to be alive in a desert town overrun by novelists, poets, muckrakers, gypsy scholars, quirky bar bands, gifted bartenders, chefs with new ideas, eminent archaeologists and anthropologists, painters, sculptors, printmakers, cowboys and Indians, cranky geniuses, and at least one literary-minded ethnobotanist.
     At some point in this mixed up history he had the great good fortune to marry Colette Mullaney, who was named, prophetically, for the French writer and is a goddess in her own right. Various events, some disastrous, some happy, occurred. For several lovely but impoverished years he edited an online magazine for readers and writers called TW3. Now he is freelance again, appearing in print as Food & Wine Editor for Sarasota Magazine, in conjunction with which he is a judge of the annual James Beard Awards, and as a frequent contributor to the feature pages of the St. Petersburg Times. And then there's the novel. . . .