John Nova Lomax

Seventh-generation Texan John Nova Lomax has been a full-time journalist in and around Houston for 20 years. He has been a music editor and staff writer for the alt-weekly Houston Press and a senior editor for Texas monthly and is currently a writer-at-large for Texas Highways magazine and a freelancer. His work has appeared in the New York Times, Vice, Al-Jazeera.com, CNN.com, the Houston Chronicle, Texas Observer, Village Voice and LA Weekly. In 2008, his profile of troubled country singer Doug Supernaw won Lomax an ASCAP-Deems Taylor award for quality in music journalism for which Lomax was honored at the Lincoln Center. Prior to settling down, Lomax shucked oysters in Nashville; cut grass and clerked mail in Lancashire, England; toiled in the irrigated desert fields of the Israeli Negev and in a Galilee kitchen as a kibbutz volunteer; and later managed the same magazine rack Wes Anderson had once tended to in a Houston Barnes and Noble bookstore. Amid all that and his averion to higher math, Lomax managed not to acquire so much as an undergrad degree, not from the University of Texas nor Belmont University nor the University of Houston, from which he dropped out mid-semester to begin his career in journalism. He is the father of John Henry Lomax, a 24-year-old student and US army veteran, and Harriet Rose Lomax, a 17-year-old high school student. He lives in a fisherman's cabin with a chubby chihuahua-esque rescue mutt named Boo on the San Bernard River, 70 miles from downtown Houston but only 20 from the urban sprawl. He is an unabashed and unashamed Houston Astros fan.