John Givens was born in Northern California, got his BA in English literature at the California State University Fresno and his MFA in creative writing at the Iowa Writers’ Workshop, University of Iowa, where he was a Teaching/Writing Fellow. He was a U.S. Peace Corps Volunteer in South Korea for two years; he studied language and art in Kyoto for four years; and he worked as a writer and editor in Tokyo for eight years. For fifteen years, Givens was a creative director and branding consultant for advertising agencies in New York then San Francisco. He has published three novels in the US: Sons of the Pioneers, A Friend in the Police, and Living Alone; short stories have appeared in various journals in the US, Europe and Japan. His non-fiction publications include Dublin Bay: Mirror to the City and Irish Walled Towns. The Plum Rains, a book of short stories set in seventeenth-century Japan, was recently published in Dublin by The Liffey Press. “The Silver Jaguar” is part of On the Wheel of Wandering On, a novel in progress.