JOHN SUITER is a writer-photographer from Philadelphia, where he moved in 2006 after 25 years in Boston. He is author of the critically acclaimed Poets on the Peaks: Gary Snyder, Philip Whalen & Jack Kerouac in the North Cascades, published in 2002 by Counterpoint Press. Born and raised in the Philadelphia area, Suiter received his bachelor’s degree, in American Literature and Creative Writing, from Syracuse University in 1973. In the late 1960s and early 70s he traveled around the United States, writing free-lance articles for underground newspapers such as the Berkeley Barb, the Madison Kaleidoscope, the Syracuse Nickel Review, and The Black Panther. From 1981 to 2006 he made his home in Boston, where in the mid-1980s he returned to school, taking courses in photography at the Art Institute of Boston and the School of the Museum of Fine Arts. Since 1989, he has worked as a professional photographer for a combination of commercial, non-profit, and editorial clients. In 1989, he published his first extensive photo-essay, for Bostonia magazine, entitled “Kerouac’s Lowell”—ten images of locales in present-day Lowell, Massachusetts, that were settings for books by Jack Kerouac. This photo-essay led in turn to Suiter’s receiving a culture grant from the Department of the Interior to create an exhibit of images of Kerouac locales for the Lowell Preservation Commission. In 1993, that exhibit, “Rumors of Kerouac,” was shown at the James McNeil Whistler House in Lowell and the Boott Gallery at Lowell National Historical Park. In 1994, he was Associate Producer of the award-winning multimedia project, A Jack Kerouac CD-Romnibus. Also that year, six of his Kerouac-related photographs were exhibited at the Washington Square East Gallery in New York City in the group show, “The Birth of the Beat Generation.” In 1995, Suiter traveled to the North Cascades, where he spent two weeks working as a volunteer fire lookout for the National Park Service at Desolation Peak. From this trip, Suiter produced an exhibit of photographs for the North Cascades National Park Visitors’ Center in Newhalem, Washington. In 1996-97 he published a series of photo-essays and articles on Kerouac and Desolation Peak for The Seattle Times, The Independent (London, England), Sierra, and Shambhala Sun. In 1997 and ‘98, Suiter returned to the Cascades for further shooting trips and also met Gary Snyder and Philip Whalen in California. He made portraits of them, taped interviews, and began the extensive correspondence with them which would inform his book, Poets on the Peaks. In June 2000, he published a lengthy article on the death of the Pop artist Ray Johnson, for The Sunday Review of The Independent in London. Also in 2000, a selection of his Kerouac-related photographs from Lowell, Mexico, and the North Cascades entitled “Jack Kerouac’s America: A Photographer’s Journey,” was exhibited at Salem State College in Salem, Massachusetts, and later in the year at the Amerikahaus gallery in Frankfurt, Germany. He was also invited to teach a seminar on the poetry of Gary Snyder, Philip Whalen, and Jack Kerouac in the American Studies Department of Goethe University in Frankfurt. In December 2000 he returned to California for further interviews with Snyder, Michael McClure, Philip Lamantia, and Joanne Kyger. Poets on the Peaks was completed in January 2002. Throughout this period and to the present he has continued to do free-lance assignment work for commercial and editorial clients. He is presently at work on a biography of Gary Snyder, to be published by Shoemaker & Hoard in 2010.