Author / Professor / Essayist
John Paul Jaramillo
John Paul Jaramillo is the author of The House of Order, a 2013 International Latino Book Award finalist for Best First Book, Little Mocos, and Carlos Montoya, a 2024 International Latino Book Award finalist for Best Latino-Focused Novel. His books explore family, memory, labor, and cultural inheritance in Southern Colorado.
His work has appeared in numerous literary journals, including The Acentos Review, Palabra, and riverSedge: A Journal of Art and Literature, among others. In 2013, Latino Boom: An Anthology of U.S. Latino Literature named Jaramillo one of its “Top 10 New Latino Authors to Watch and Read.” Currently, Jaramillo works as Professor of English at Lincoln Land Community College in Springfield, Illinois.
Teaching
A longtime professor of English and creative writing at Lincoln Land Community College in Springfield, Illinois, Jaramillo teaches literature, composition, and creative writing with a focus on critical thinking, cultural awareness, and the ethical responsibilities of writers working in public-facing spaces.
Current Work
Drawing from family oral histories, regional archives, and working-class narratives, he writes fiction grounded in place. He is currently at work on a novel and a memoir rooted in the lives and legacies of his grandparents’ generation.
His writing blends gritty realism with lyricism and myth, often examining how private lives are shaped by history, labor, and displacement. Blending archival research, oral history, and a lyric narrative sensibility, Jaramillo’s work locates beauty and meaning in the overlooked lives of the Southwest, where memory, labor, and imagination intersect to remake the past.
“Jaramillo is writing about working in Southern Colorado farm fields, driving and drinking beer and smoking pot; visiting family members in the state penitentiary; about tattooed pregnant girls, dirty kids in laundromats and their desperate mothers—and the pain-filled list goes on, back through several decades. What saves these stories is the grace in which they are written.”
— Mary Jean Porter