Jon Swan

Jon Swan is an American poet, playwright, librettist, journalist, and editor. He studied at Oberlin College, from which he graduated with a degree in English in 1950. In the 1950s, he taught at the Ecole d'Humanite in Switzerland, worked for the American Friends Service Committee, and received a Master's Degree in English from Boston University. During the 1970s, he worked as a translator, from Dutch and German, and was senior editor at Saturday Review and, later, senior editor of the Columbia Journalism Review.After retiring in 1994, he worked as an editor in Beijing and Kathmandu. As a free-lance journalist, he has written about environmental issues in the U.S. and Iceland. He was awarded a Rockefeller Grant for play-writing in 1968 and a Guggenheim Fellowship for film-writing in 1981.

Articles by this Author

The Slave Who Sued for Freedom, March 1990 | Vol. 41, No. 2

While the American Revolution was still being fought, Mum Bett declared that the new nation’s principle of liberty must extend to her, too. It took 80 years and a far-more-terrible war to confirm the rights that she had demanded.

Innocents At Home, February 1965 | Vol. 16, No. 2

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