John Aldridge Collom (November 8, 1931 – July 2, 2017) was an American poet, essayist, and creative writing pedagogue.

[4][5] He and his sister Jane Wodening grew up in the small town of Western Springs, Illinois,[6] spent much of his time birdwatching,[7] and over the years became an inveterate bird-watcher.

[9] Afterwards, he spent four years in the U.S. Air Force[9] and he started writing poetry in 1955 while stationed in Tripoli, Libya.

[12] Collom continued to teach creative writing to children for the next 35 years in both elementary and secondary schools,[13] where he developed a pedagogy for this type of educational approach.

[2] I think of my general approach as organic, inductive, building from the children's familiars up, rather than teaching them intricate forms to master, or attempting to initiate them into a sophisticated sensibility.

[14]Subsequently, Teachers & Writers Collaborative published three books of Collom's essays and commentary on this experience (which included the young students' poems), notably Poetry Everywhere and Moving Windows.

[9] From 1986 until his death in 2017, Collom taught at Naropa University's Jack Kerouac School of Disembodied Poetics as an adjunct professor[3][5] where he shaped Writing Outreach, a community creative-writing project, into a course.

[20] He read and taught throughout the United States, in Mexico, Costa Rica, Austria, Belgium, and Germany.

I was motivated by the cause of ecology—saving nature and ourselves from our own foolish extinction through pollution and overuse of resources—and the fact that it's an art with admirable philosophical achievements.