Bob Jones was born in America but has spent most of his life in Australia and has taken out Australian citizenship.He has a BA from the University of Wisconsin (1963) and has also gained a PhD in English (Comparative literature, English/Japanese) from the University of Newcastle (1994). He taught English in Tonga with the Peace Corps in 1967-1968 and at the University of Chiengmai in Thailand in 1970. In Australia he has taught English and Creative Writing in high schools and TAFE colleges and has been an adult education teacher in a number of different subjects through the Workers Education Authority (WEA) and the University of Newcastle's Department of Community Programmes. He has published novels, poetry and a book for children, and has been a freelance writer since 1994.
He is a blackbelt Aikido instructor, and mentions his other 'offbeat interests' as being 'haiku, alchemy, cabala, mysticism and the teachings of Gurdjieff' (private correspondence). He has published a large number of haiku in Australia and America and his English translations of Japanese haiku have been published in Japan. He is featured in The First Australian Haiku Anthology . Since 1991 he has written a number of articles on haiku for the U. S. journal Modern Haiku and in 1995 he received a literary award from the Constanza Haiku Society, Romania 'for his essays on haiku, published in Modern Haiku.'
