John Blankenship is an author and photojournalist with more than 50 years of experience working with newspapers and magazines.
He has published award-winning features and photo essays on the Cajuns of Louisiana; lobstermen of Maine and Nova Scotia; wild horses of the Outer Banks, NC; travels on Route 66 from St. Louis, MO, to Alburquerque, NM; as well as on countless Appalachian folk throughout Southern West Virginia and beyond. Two of his essays appear in Garret Matthews’ book, Columnists While We’re Still Around, an anthology which includes some of the top journalists in America.
John also is a retired educator, having taught AP English composition, poetry, creative writing, speech, journalism, British and American literature, and technical writing, both on the high school and college levels.
He is the author of more than 2,500 features, columns, magazine articles and photo essays featured in a variety of national and regional publications. He is a former literacy and writing coach for Raleigh County Schools. He served as a consultant with the West Virginia Department of Education while helping Raleigh County students improve their writing scores from 2005-2010.
In addition, John helped produce award-winning student newspapers and yearbooks at Woodrow Wilson and Shady Spring high schools and was recently inducted into the WV Journalism Teacher’s Hall of Fame at West Virginia University.
He was named WV Softball Coach of the Year in 1992. He led his Shady Spring girls’ softball team to four state “Triple A” titles in the early 1990s.
John is the author of Songs of the Whippoorwill—an Appalachian Odyssey, a trilogy published in 2017-18. The books are available at Lulu, Amazon, Barnes and Noble, and Tamarac in Beckley. His next book, titled Appalachian Chronicles, will be published in September 2001.
John and his wife, Rebecca Lynn, also a retired educator and former advisor for both high school and college publications, make their home in Beckley.