,,,,,John Phillip Santos recently returned to his hometown of San Antonio, Texas, after twenty-one years in New York.  He was (and remains) a freelance filmmaker, producer, journalist and writer whose work focuses on issues of media, culture and ethnic identity. His articles have appeared in the Los Angeles Times and the New York Times, among numerous other publications. A former executive producer and director of new program development for Thirteen/WNET, Santos also produced over 40 documentaries for CBS and PBS, two of them nominated for Emmy Awards. In 1997, Santos joined the Ford Foundation as an officer in the Media, Arts and Culture Program, where he handled the Media Projects Fund and worked with new media technologies, especially as they pertain to developing countries.

    Santos was the first Mexican-American Rhodes scholar to study at Oxford. He holds degrees in English Literature and Language from Oxford University and in Philosophy and Literature from the University of Notre Dame. He is a recipient of the Academy of American Poets’ Prize at Notre Dame and the Oxford Prize for fiction.  Santos is currently a Visiting Fellow at the Watson Institute for Inter-national Studies at Brown University.

    Santos’ 1999 family memoir, Places Left Unfinished at the Time of Creation (Viking / Penguin) was a finalist for the National Book Award. In 2006 it was selected for the “One Book, One City” reading program in San Antonio. Places Left Unfinished at the Time of Creation is a beautifully crafted work – a haunting prose poem to a city, a region, and a people, interwoven with Mexican mythology, Chicano folk tales, family stories, and dreams.