John Phillip Santos
Professor of Interdisciplinary Humanities and Distinguished Senior Lecturer in Mestizo Cultural Studies, Honors College
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Bio
John Phillip Santos is a writer, journalist, and documentary filmmaker 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 themes in sixteen countries for CBS and PBS. His journalism and commentary have 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. This work is archived in the Special Collections 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 media infrastructure and production, making more than $40M in grants to support the development of independent media networks in the US, Latin America, Africa, and Asia, and to fund the production of documentaries around the world.
A proud graduate of Texas public schools, Santos was the first Latino to be selected as a Rhodes Scholar and 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 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.
In 2017, he was awarded the Texas Medal for the Arts in Literature.
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