A one-time broadcast journalist and a business journalist for nearly 40 years, John McClenahen received bachelor’s and master’s degrees in English from, respectively, St. Lawrence University (Canton, New York) and Western Reserve University (Cleveland, Ohio). He received a Master of Arts in Liberal Studies from Georgetown University (Washington, D.C.) where he has pursued doctoral studies. At St. Lawrence University, he was elected to two academic honorary societies and to Omicron Delta Kappa, the university’s highest undergraduate honor. In 2000, John McClenahen was a participant in the 32nd Annual Wharton Seminars for Journalists at The Wharton School, University of Pennsylvania, Philadelphia.
During Easter Term of the 1986 academic year, John McClenahen was the first American to hold a prestigious Press Fellowship at Wolfson College, Cambridge.
John McClenahen has served on the Editorial Review Board of Confluence: The Journal of Graduate Liberal Studies and was co-founding editor of Liberal Studies at Georgetown. His essays on aesthetics and nineteenth-century American cultural history have been published in Confluence: The Journal of Graduate Liberal Studies. His essay “Incorporating America: Whitman in Context,” The Journal of Graduate Liberal Studies, V, no. 2 (Spring 2000): 119-132, and reprinted in Confluence: The Journal of Graduate Liberal Studies, XII, no. 1 (Fall 2007): 138-151, was designated one of the five best works published in The Journal during the twelve-year editorship of R. Barry Levis.
John McClenahen’s first book of poetry, Eight Mile: Selected Poems, was published in 2008. A second book of poems, Not Only Explorers, was published in 2009. The Unexpected Poet, a third book of poems is slated to be published in 2013.
Twelve books of John McClenahen’s photographs have been privately published, including: Henry, The Cats, Images of the American Southwest, The Cape, Clouds, Clouds of Broadkill Beach, Beach House, An American Journey, An Alaskan Journey, Images of Alaska, and Denali.
“Provincetown: Fog Rising 2004,” one of John McClenahen’s photographs, was selected for the Smithsonian Institution’s 2011 juried exhibition Artists at Work, and displayed in the S. Dillon Ripley Center at the Smithsonian Institution in Washington, D.C., from June until October, 2011.
Several of John McClenahen’s photographs were included in the Graduate Liberal Studies Art Event Circuitous Roots on October 12, 2012, at Georgetown University in Washington, D.C.
John McClenahen’s journalism prizes include the coveted Jesse H. Neal National Business Journalism Award (2004) and several awards from the American Society for Business Press Editors.
John McClenahen has been a volunteer researcher on the William Steinway Diary Project at the Smithsonian Institution’s National Museum of American History in Washington, D.C. He has been an assistant professorial lecturer at The George Washington University, Washington, D.C.
John McClenahen also is an occasional essayist on the Web site of IndustryWeek, from which he retired in 2006.
