Wood is Professor Emeritus of English literature and photographic history at McNeese State University, where he founded and directed its MFA in creative writing for more than twenty-five years.

[5] Wood's poetry often evokes voices of oracular zeal and subject matter focusing on family, suffering and soulful conviction.

"[2] With formalist tendencies, John Wood brings a neoclassical aesthetic to post-modernism with poems on science, religion, pop culture and Southern Gothic.

He also translated Baudelaire's Flowers of Evil[6] and wrote poems in accompaniment to photographic collaborations with Charles Grogg[7] and Steven Albahari.

In addition, Wood contributed essays to and wrote the catalog copy for dozens of books of photography, featuring work by artists Jock Sturges, Imogen Cunningham and John Dugdale.

Previous editions have paired the writings of Edward Albee, Annie Dillard, Robert Olen Butler, Adam Johnson and Richard Wilbur with the photographs of such artists as Imogen Cunningham, Duane Michals, Joel-Peter Witkin, Keith Carter and Sally Mann.