John Ben­ditt began as a poet. He stud­ied with Adri­enne Rich at Swarth­more Col­lege and was award­ed the John Rus­sell Hayes Poet­ry Prize by Robert Cree­ley. He went on to have a dis­tin­guished career as a sci­ence jour­nal­ist. He was an edi­tor at Sci­en­tif­ic Amer­i­can and Sci­ence and served as Edi­tor in Chief of Tech­nol­o­gy Review, pub­lished by MIT. The Boat­mak­er is his first novel.