John J. McLaughlin

McLaughlin's website

John J. McLaughlin was born in Texas, and raised in Virginia and Washington, DC, where he was educated in Catholic schools. He holds degrees from the University of Virginia, and the University of Iowa Writers’ Workshop. For many years he worked in direct service to homeless and incarcerated individuals in Los Angeles and Seattle. He currently works as Director of Education Across Borders, a non-profit organization that serves indigent communities in the Dominican Republic.

His writings have appeared in The Washington Post, National Catholic Reporter, Radical Grace, and other periodicals, and he is the recipient of a Wagenheim Prize for his short fiction. An excerpt from his memoir-in-progress is forthcoming in Young and Catholic (Paulist Press, 2008), an anthology of stories by Catholic authors under 35. He lives in Seattle with his wife and children. Run in the Fam’ly is his first novel.

Novelist Jon Manchip White, final judge for the 2006 competition, called McLaughlin's manuscript a considerable accomplishment, "characterized by remarkable fluidity and consistency of tone, and marked by descriptive passages balanced and interspersed by a keen and convincing talent for dialogue."

White continued: "The grip it exercises on the reader is all the more remarkable given the mordant and unrelenting nature of the subject: the struggles of a family of the African-American underclass in the environment of Northern and Western cities...This is a serious study of the African-Amercan experience. Its tone is sober, though at times it can become lyrical, and altogether it recalled for the judge one of the Rougon-Macquart novels of one of his favorite writers, Emile Zola, with its amalgam of a gripping narrative with a sober sociological content. It is informative as well as compelling."