Head, John 1951-

PERSONAL:

Born 1951.

ADDRESSES:

Agent—c/o Author Mail, Broadway Books, 1745 Broadway, 18th Fl., New York, NY 10019. E-mail—jhnfhead@aol.com.

CAREER:

Journalist. Worked as press secretary for Atlanta Mayor Maynard Jackson; member of board of trustees for the Penn Center.

AWARDS, HONORS:

Best memoir, Georgia Writers Association, 2000, for We Were the Land's: The Biography of a Homeplace; Rosalyn Carter Mental Health Journalism fellow, Carter Center, 1999-2000.

WRITINGS:

We Were the Land's: The Biography of a Homeplace, Longstreet Press (Athens, GA), 1999.

Standing in the Shadows: Understanding and Overcoming Depression in Black Men, Broadway Books (New York, NY), 2004.

Editorial board member and author of a column in the Atlanta Constitution. Contributor to periodicals, including Detroit Free Press, USA Today, and Atlanta Journal.

SIDELIGHTS:

John Head has worked as a journalist for several decades and was a Rosalyn Carter Mental Health Journalism fellow in 1999-2000. Head has contributed to various publications, including the Detroit Free Press, USA Today, Atlanta Constitution, and Atlanta Journal (now the Atlanta Journal-Constitution). In 1999 Head published We Were the Land's: The Biography of a Homeplace, a personal book about the farm his grandfather had purchased in 1939 and its modern-day restoration. Writing in Library Journal, Nancy R. Ives called Head's debut "a warm and engaging story."

Five years later, Head published another personal account, Standing in the Shadows: Understanding and Overcoming Depression in Black Men. Here, Head outlines his own battles with depression and discusses depression among African-American men as a communal problem. Reviews of Standing in the Shadows were predominantly positive. Gregory Mott, writing in the San Diego Union-Tribune, noted that "Head writes most evocatively … in his description of the toll his illness took on his relationships with his wife and his three sons." In a New York Times review, John Langone felt the book had other strengths. Langone commented that Head "writes movingly" about how he felt his manhood unraveling while struggling to deal with his feelings. Amy Alexander, in her critique for the Black Issues Book Review, looked beyond Head's personal account and paid particular attention to the issue as a whole. Overall, she concluded that "Head's polemic is inspiring and long overdue" and that he "provided poignant talking points that search for solutions."

BIOGRAPHICAL AND CRITICAL SOURCES:

BOOKS

Head, John, We Were the Land's: The Biography of a Homeplace, Longstreet Press (Athens, GA), 1999.

Head, John, Standing in the Shadows: Understanding and Overcoming Depression in Black Men, Broadway Books (New York, NY), 2004.

PERIODICALS

Black Issues Book Review, January-February, 2005, Amy Alexander, review of Standing in the Shadows, p. 41.

Booklist, June 1, 1999, GraceAnne A. DeCandido, review of We Were the Land's, p. 1771; September 1, 2004, Vernon Ford, review of Standing in the Shadows, p. 34.

Ebony, November, 2004, review of Standing in the Shadows, p. 28.

Library Journal, July, 1999, Nancy R. Ives, review of We Were the Land's, p. 118; August, 2004, Mary Ann Hughes, review of Standing in the Shadows, p. 102.

New York Times, August 17, 2004, John Langone, review of Standing in the Shadows. Publishers Weekly, May 24, 1999, review of We Were the Land's, p. 59.

San Diego Union-Tribune, July 31, 2005, Gregory Mott, review of Standing in the Shadows.

USA Today, April 27, 2005, Marilyn Elias, review of Standing in the Shadows, p. D6.

ONLINE

Carter Center Web site,http://www.cartercenter.org/ (June 25, 2006), author profile.

DePauw University Web site,http://www.depauw.edu/ (June 25, 2006), author profile.

John Head Home Page,http://www.johnhead.net (June 25, 2006), author profile.

Random House Web site,http://www.randomhouse.com/ (June 25, 2006), author interview.