John Igo is a San Antonio educator, writer, artist, photographer, producer, critic, and civic leader. A graduate of Trinity University, he has taught at Trinity, St. Mary's Hall, San Antonio College, and the University of the Incarnate Word. He has received the Piper Professor of the Year Award 1991, the NISOD Teaching Excellence Award, International Convention, 1992.

He is the producer of many plays, he is the founder producer/director of Renegade Theater and the volunteer Project Manager of the Theater Archive, San Antonio Public Library, a Friends project. Igo has served as  a drama critic for several San Antonio publications and is a well known broadcast personality featured on WOAI's "Morning Magazine," reading poetry for ten years; he was also the Drama critic on KLRN-TV's "Art Beat," a long-running PBS-affiliate show.

He has published twelve books on poetry, including the Third Temptation of St. John (National Society of Arts and Letters National Award). God of Gardens (Southwest Writers Conference Publication Award), Alien (Poetry Society Foundation). In addition, he has authored several books of prose and several produced plays.

In 1985, Igo received an Emmy for his script - "Our Children: the Next Generation." In the 1960's he won two Translation Awards (German/Spanish) from Poet Lore International. In 1974 he received the Speech Arts Association's First Distinguished Medal. In the 1980's he received the Grothaus medallion for Distinguished Service to area libraries (the only non-librarian ever to receive it). In 1997 he was named Deputy director General of the International Biographical Centre (Cambridge, England).

 

He has been mentor to a generation of area poets, and he has been the teacher of poetry to the totally deaf adult, a special, privately funded project of San Antonio.

In December of 2007, hundreds of people gathered around John Igo as San Antonio opened another library, but not just any library - The John Igo Library

Local Legend Igo Visits With Historians, by Sarah Snyder


John Igo recalls his parents dropping him off at a storyteller’s house in lieu of a babysitter’s. It was the first carpeted floor he could remember. The storyteller, a Mr. Bearing, sat in a giant wicker chair amid Igo and the other children present.
If a child became tired or bored, he would just “tilt over and sleep on the carpet,” Igo recollected. “Every time they came back I was still wide awake, regardless. And he (Bearing) talked,” Igo said. “Endless stories, stories, stories. All folk stories. He wasn’t telling jokes. He wasn’t telling us about Peter Rabbit.”

At a recent meeting of the Helotes Historical Society, Igo regaled a meager crowd with his own tales. After two hours, nobody was even close to...