[OFFICIAL BIO]

John Byrne Barry is a writer, designer, actor, bike tour leader, and crossing guard.

He wrote his first book-length project — a 140-page treatise on dinosaurs — in fifth grade at Kilmer School in Chicago. One page for each dinosaur. Lots of white space. He’s been writing ever since — magazine and newspaper articles, advice columns, political comedy and murder mystery plays. He’s even written for seed catalogs.

His first novel — Bones in the Wash: Politics is Tough. Family is Tougher, set during the 2008 presidential campaign in New Mexico, won the 2015 Best Book Award from the Bay Area Independent Publishers Association (BAIPA).

[UNOFFICIAL BIO]

I lived in Berkeley for 25 years, and somewhere in there, I started writing about the local recycling and garbage scene. After all, Berkeley practically invented recycling, just like Al Gore invented the internet.

After months of research and taming drafts that were more like spaghetti than prose, I wrote “The End of Garbage” for the East Bay Express. Some readers urged me to write a book.

But I rarely read nonfiction books, so why would I write one? I wanted to write what I liked to read, which is how Wasted, my “green-noir” mystery set in the Berkeley recycling world, came about. All that research became my backdrop. Everything else I made up.

That’s how I continue to write. I start with real-world problems, then add fiction. My third novel, the almost completed When I Killed My Father, An Assisted-Suicide Family Thriller, starts with very real end-of-life challenges, and is informed by my experiences with my parents, but the story is fiction.

When I’m not writing, I might be volunteering as a bartender for Creekside Fridays in Tam Valley. Or leading bicycle tours in San Francisco. Or I might be balancing on a paddleboard for the first time ever in the lower Adirondacks, as I did last summer.