Jack Eidt is a novelist, urban planner, and environmental activist based out
of Los Angeles and Orange County, California. He earned a Master’s
Degree from UCLA in Urban and Regional Development and a Bachelor’s from
the University of California at Santa Barbara in Environmental Studies with a
minor in Creative Writing. He has been employed by land developers,
municipal governments, and planning consultants, including three years with The
Walt Disney Company designing a theme park and resort expansion in Southern California. He
has consulted for the Nicaraguan Ministry of Tourism and the Municipality of
Senahú in Alta Verapaz, Guatemala, and studied subsistence ecology and
ethnobotany while living among the Miskito of Honduras, in villages
along the Grande Anse Peninsula in Haiti, and on an island off Sumatra. In 2004, he founded Wild Heritage Planners, an organization dedicated to sustainable environmental planning advocacy, proposing solutions to fight urban sprawl and save precious wild habitat. He has published opinion/editorials in various periodicals, including the Los Angeles Times and Orange County Register, and has been featured on Pacifica Radio, NPR, and local public television. He also serves as a Board Member to a non-profit organization dedicated to the preservation and management of wilderness and parkland in Southern California. He won the Fiction Award at the Southern California Writer’s Conference, attended Squaw Valley on a fellowship, and had residencies at the Millay Colony and Vermont Studio Center. This year he also plans a return to the caves and waterfalls of northern Guatemala to continue his next novel inspired by environmental and political investigations with the Q’eqchi Maya and the creation myth of the Popol Vuh.