Dr. John WorldPeace JD was born in Texas in 1948. He earned three degrees while working full time and went on to build a career entirely through self-employment — across insurance, accounting, tax, and law — before turning to art, poetry, and eventually the framework now known as Teach Peace.
He legally adopted the name WorldPeace in 1988, at a personal turning point in his life, choosing it as the one goal in his life he considered impossible to fully achieve and therefore worth organizing the rest of his work around. He wrote his first manuscript on the subject that same year — a work that drew serious interest from a major publisher before ultimately being passed over.
In the decades since, he has produced an extraordinary and unusually well-documented body of independent work: roughly 150 published books, more than 8,000 poems, and hundreds of hours of large-scale paintings. He ran a painting-apprenticeship program for a number of years and has continued to write, paint, and refine the Teach Peace framework without institutional support or funding.
For the past decade, he has lived a deliberately minimal, self-supporting life — without property, a vehicle, or dependents — devoting that time to consolidating decades of work into a form ready for academic and public use. At seventy-eight, he remains actively engaged daily in writing, correspondence, and outreach, and is seeking an academic partner to carry the framework into formal study.