John Broglio
John Broglio was called out by a high school teacher for having “the greatest trove of useless knowledge I have ever encountered.” This was in a class in Homeric Greek, so the teacher could be judged a trivia expert. A classical education in high school and a concentration in German and French literature in college were overshadowed by time spent in theater and performing arts. After co-founding a couple of exciting but short-lived theater troupes, the author gravitated into translation and then into computer work, earning a Computer Science MS in computational linguistics. He abandoned his doctoral program when he realized he would rather spend those years writing a novel (which he characterized as “intentional fiction” as opposed to the unintentional fiction of any dissertation he might have written). He first discovered Shakespeare in the back seat of a car, when he found Romeo and Juliet in his older brother’s literature textbook while carpooling to high school. He sheltered a secret passion for the plays and poems through all the experimental theater movements of the sixties and seventies.
In John’s chapbook Towards the Pebbled Shore, he imagines an aged Shakespeare dictating stories from his life to a young scribe. Broglio vividly portrays the people and conditions of Elizabethan London, as recounted by the old bard from his retirement in Stratford.