John Clifford is Professor of English at the University of North Carolina at Wilmington, where he teaches literature, writing, and theory. During the summer he teaches literary response at the Graduate School of Education at the University of Pennsylvania and reading theory at Northeastern's Martha's Vineyard Workshops. He has taught writing at Queens College, CUNY, and was a high school English teacher and chairman for ten years in Brooklyn, New York. He received his Ph.D. in 1977 from New York University