J. A. Hijiya was born in Spokane, Washington, in 1949. He was educated in the public schools (Washington Irving Elementary, Lewis and Clark High) and at the public library. From the age of twelve to the age of twenty he worked for the Spokane Spokesman-Review as a paperboy, copy boy, reporter, and copy editor. He majored in English at Brown University, then switched to History for his Ph.D. at Cornell. He taught for two years at Ithaca College, then twenty-five at the University of Massachusetts Dartmouth. His Ph.D. dissertation was a collective biography of several members of the De Forest family of Connecticut; and while it was never issued as a single volume, parts of it were published in two volumes: J. W. De Forest and the Rise of American Gentility (1988) and Lee de Forest and the Fatherhood of Radio (1992). Never entirely cured of his earlier habit of journalism, he also published occasional feature stories and opinion pieces in newspapers. After retiring from teaching, he wrote A Piece of Valiant Dust: An Essay in Living (2017), a volume of personal essays, chapters of which appeared in the Antioch Review (2008) and Raritan (2013).
Send questions, comments and corrections to info@creativewritingmfa.info.
Disclaimer: No endorsement of these ratings should be implied by the writers and writing programs listed on this site, or by the editors and publishers of Best American Short Stories, Best American Essays, Best American Poetry, The O. Henry Prize Stories and The Pushcart Prize Anthology.