John H. McGlynn, a graduate of the University of Michigan Ann Arbor (1981), lives in Jakarta where, in 1987, he and four Indonesian authors established the Lontar  Foundation, the only organization in the world devoted to the publication of Indonesian literature in translation. As the translator of several dozen publications, he has garnered  much international praise for his work. Through Lontar, McGlynn has ushered into print close to two hundred books on Indonesian literature and culture. Also through Lontar, he initiated the “On the Record” film documentation program, which thus far includes twenty-four films on Indonesian writers and more than thirty films on Indonesian performance traditions. 

McGlynn is the Indonesian country editor for Manoa, a literary journal published by  the University of Hawaii; and a contributing editor to Words Without Borders, Warscapes (two U.S. based literary journals), and Cordite Review, an Australian literary journal. He is a founding member of the Asia Pacific Writers and Translators Association and a member of the International Commission of the Indonesian Publishers Association (IKAPI), PEN International-New York, and the Association of Asian Studies. McGlynn is also a  trustee of AMINEF, the American Indonesian Exchange Foundation, which oversees the (U.S. government-sponsored) Fulbright and Humphrey scholarship programs in Indonesia.