ABOUT US

Lewis Jenkins began preparing to write books when his father, an Electrical Engineer, read him Pogo comics at bedtime. They sparked the boy’s fascination with both human history and comic fantasy because dad explained the social and political satire in Walt Kelly’s work.

          He graduated from the University of Akron with a BA in Education and an Ohio High School teaching certificate in history, government, and math. Although math teachers got jobs instantly, no school would guarantee him a history course. Loving history ever since Pop read him Pogo, he wanted to escape math for a while each week by sharing fascinating true stories of the past. The media usually portrayed tragic-comic human history as something dated and tedious. He would teach it as a storyteller sharing inside news.

          But coaches had the history courses sewed up. So he chased smokestacks for ten years, buying and selling used electrical equipment and other industrial machinery. Then he worked for four decades, mostly as a hired gun (contract programmer) writing computer code in Cobol, Forth, Java (plus other languages you never heard of) for Sherwin Williams, Office Max, Goodyear (plus other companies you never heard of).

          He retired to write articles, novels, and short stories, all in English. His lifetime of reading history, mystery, and sci-fi tech will often show in his work, but his Diary of a Robot is not so much about the past, nor is it so much a tale of AI science fiction. Consider it a story of future history since it and its sequel are probably happening. There is a tiny bit of math in it, too. Sorry.

          Mr. Jenkins's children's book, Maynard and the Bullies, was born out of the Robot book. It grew up as he feasted first on his own experiences with bullies and the history of invention, then on the history of the Cherokee and other native American nations, and finally on the realization that most of human history is about families, inventing, and bullying.