Tyler McPeek (pictured above, center, with poet Ronald Bayes, left, and Donald Keene, right, at St. Andrews College) began writing poetry and fiction in his early teens and has been published in numerous magazines, literary journals, and individual publications. In his second year of college (at St. Andrews Presbyterian College), he published his first collection of poetry, entitled Questions of a Nightingale. This collection won the 1997 Bunn-McClelland Chapbook Award. In the fall of 1997, Tyler studied for a semester under the tutelage of internationally renowned poet Ezra Pound's daughter and family at Brunnenburg Castle in the Sud Tirol of Northern Italy. He has also studied for credit under various other scholars as an undergraduate student, including Ronald H. Bayes, Donald Keene, Carl Walters and others, at an array of different institutions, including: Reynolda House Museum of American Art, Wake Forest University, the University of Hawaii at Manoa, and field study in India.
In 1999, Tyler moved to Japan where he was a high school teacher in the Japanese government sponsored JET Program, as well as a small business owner and consultant to several small companies in the Hokuriku region of western Japan. In 2005, he completed an MBA in international business and marketing from Ritsumeikan Asia Pacific University (立命館アジア太平洋大学). Following the completion of his MBA, he lived, worked, and studied in Seoul, South Korea for 1 year, where he collaborated with professors at Yonsei University and oversaw the implementation of business plans that he wrote for a Korean company as part of his MBA thesis. During this time, he also traveled to San Francisco as a guest lecturer at UC Berkeley, as well as trips to Taipei, Bangkok (coordinating with professors and graduate students at Chulalongkorn University), and Tokyo for marketing and technical presentations and distribution contract negotiations.
Tyler spent 2007 studying and doing research at Sophia University (上智大学) in Tokyo. He is now back in his native Florida, where he began his doctoral studies and a teaching assistantship in the Linguistics Department at the University of Florida from the fall of 2008. He received his MA in Linguistics and Graduate TESL Certificate from UF in 2010. His PhD studies and dissertation work are ongoing (www.voicetypes.com). Tyler's academic contributions in Linguistics and Business have been published and presented at various academic institutions, including Harvard University, Université de Paris-Sorbonne, and Yonsei University.
Much of the fiction and poetry featured here were written during his time in Japan and during his travels around the globe, to various countries, including the continental US and Hawai'i, Canada, Mexico, Ecuador, Costa Rica, Cuba, The Netherlands, Germany, Austria, Switzerland, Italy, Egypt, India, Indonesia, Malaysia, Thailand, Singapore, Australia, South Korea, Hong Kong, Mainland China, and Taiwan.
