John Allen Small

By day, John Allen Small is a professional journalist with 30-plus years of experience and more than 250 awards from the Oklahoma Press Association, the Society of Professional Journalists, the National Newspaper Association, the Associated Press and the Oklahoma Education Association. In his secret identity as a fiction writer and pop culture historian, he has been a guest speaker at a number of literary and pop culture-related events - most notably the 2006 San Diego Comic-Con - and has written authorized adventures of the Green Hornet, the Avenger and Philip Jose Farmer's time traveling hero, John Gribardsun. Other notable works include "The Beast," which tells the "true" history of King Kong; "The Phelps Dossier," an examination of how the heroic leader of TV's IMF became the turncoat depicted in the first Tom Cruise "Mission: Impossible" theatrical film; and "The Bright Heart of Eternity," a short story about Philip Jose Farmer and Edgar Rice Burroughs meeting in the afterlife. He married his high school sweetheart, the former Melissa Ulrich, in 1986. The couple has two sons, Joshua and William; William and his wife Charlesana are the parents of John and Melissa's granddaughters, Zoey and Willow.