John Phillip Santos

Poet, author, journalist, scholar, and inquiring sojourner, John Phillip Santos is a writer, performer, and media producer from San Antonio, Texas. His two memoirs, Places Left Unfinished at the Time of Creation (a National Book Award Finalist) and The Farthest Home is in an Empire of Fire, together tell the ancestral stories of his mother and father’s families, an American origin story of the centuries- long migrations that emerged out of Spain, Mexico, and the lands that became South Texas. His book of poems is Songs Older Than Any Known Singer.

As an Emmy-nominated television producer, he has produced more than 40 broadcast documentaries and news programs on cultural, political, and religious themes in sixteen countries for CBS and PBS. His journalism and commentary has appeared in the New York Times, the Los Angeles Times, the San Antonio Express- News, the Manchester Guardian, Texas Monthly, and other publications in the U.S., Mexico and Europe. His media works and papers are archived in the Special Collections of the library of the University of Texas San Antonio.

During his six years as a program officer at the Ford Foundation, he directed the philanthropic program in global media infrastructures and documentary production, managing more than $42M in grants to support the development of independent media networks in the US, Latin America, Africa and Asia; and to fund the production of innovative documentaries and films around the world.

A proud graduate of San Antonio public schools, Santos was the first Latinx Americano to be selected as a Rhodes Scholar, and he holds degrees in English Literature and Language from Oxford University, and Philosophy and Literature from the University of Notre Dame.

After twenty-two years in Manhattan, Santos returned to his Borderlands hometown of San Antonio in 2005, where he now lives with his wife, the poet and teacher Frances Treviño Santos, and their daughter, Francesca de la Luz.

Since 2010, he has been University Distinguished Scholar in Mestizo Cultural Studies, teaching in the Honors College at the University of Texas San Antonio. He serves on the boards of Gemini Ink Independent Writing Institute, The Briscoe Museum of Western Art, Vice-Chair of Humanities Texas, and the American Federation of State Humanities Councils.

In 2017 he was awarded the Texas Medal for the Arts in Literature. He iscurrently Professor of Borderlands Humanities and Creative Non-fiction in the interdisciplinary School for Engagement with Humanities and Social Sciences.