John Dolan is the co-host of the
Radio War Nerd podcast. Dolan is an American poet, author, and essayist, and holds a PhD in rhetoric from the University of California at Berkeley. As a senior lecturer at the
University of Otago, he taught several courses including composition and creative writing, and published the monograph
Poetic Occasion From Milton to Wordsworth.
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A literary scholar’s analysis of A Million Little Pieces and My Friend Leonard before Frey’s fraud was publicly acknowledged.
A literary scholar explains why readers often fall for authors peddling fake memoirs.
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John Dolan gained a PhD in rhetoric from the
University of California at Berkeley, where he taught before moving to New Zealand in the 1990s. As a senior lecturer at the
University of Otago, he taught several courses including composition and creative writing, and published the monograph
Poetic Occasion From Milton to Wordsworth.
From the late 1990s, Dolan wrote for and co-edited the eXile, a satirical Moscow-based newspaper. In 2002, he started writing the War Nerd column under the pseudonym Gary Brecher, a character imagined as a smart, unhappy data-entry clerk in Fresno. After the Kremlin shut the eXile down, Dolan was a regular contributor to NSFW Corp and Pando Daily.
He has published several books including Pleasant Hell, The War Nerd, The War Nerd Iliad, and Erdogan Pizza.
Since 2015 he has co-hosted the podcast
Radio War Nerd and also writes the podcast’s subscriber newsletter.
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