Hanuman's Home

About the Book

Hanuman’s Home is a book of poetry that celebrates the sixty-year odyssey John has made. India is here, the India of childhood and the India born violently and the India now forging its way in the twenty-first century. And teaching is here, that vital profession. And some of what may be the major events of our new millennium: Iraq, 9/11, the fall of the shuttle. And family.

About the Author

John Copley Alter was born and raised in India. The son of Presbyterian missionaries, his father also born on the subcontinent, John grew up in the hill-station of Mussoorie, fondly known in the vernacular of Indian tourism as ‘queen of the hills’, a world available to the interested reader in the writings of such authors as Rudyard Kipling, Ruskin Bond, and a variety of Alter’s (Tom, Stephen and Joseph, in particular). This world afforded John his first experiences of language and poetry. This world also evidently inspired a kind of perpetual restlessness. John has lived in many places, including Sweden, the United States, India, Mauritania and Senegal, accompanied for the last quarter century or so by his wife, Bett, and their three children, Aaron, Emily and Thomasin. John teaches English at The Gunnery School, in Washington, Connecticut.