Thousand Kites

Dolls, celebrities, fellow inmates, veterans, politicians, and even an Apollo astronaut: you name it and John Espinosa Nelson has written for it. With credits that include time served at Mattel’s Sound Design Studio; articles for Esquire, Details, Players, L.A. Weekly, and web assets like MoparMax and the now-defunct BigWords.com; awards show teleplays; and even radio spots, videos, and promotional material for 2.13.61 Books, Modivation Films, DreamWorks, and Maverick Records, Nelson can play it straight but is dyed-in-the-wool irreverent.

John will be the first to tell you that it was the unexpected, the unconventional, and the laugh-out-loud ridiculousness of it all that enabled such a fish-out-of-water to survive four years in the overcrowded California penal system with his wit and self intact. The journal he kept, along with critical support from family and friends, launched Nelson’s writing career and led to his first full-length manuscript, WHERE EXCUSES GO TO DIE. These days, well aware of how incarceration-happy we’ve become in the U.S., Nelson works to persuade others not to act on their own worst ideas via frequent public appearances and a blog also called Where Excuses Go to Die.

John Nelson, a rare native of his beloved city, lives with his wife in Los Angeles. He’s a regular at national writers’ conferences and was most recently interviewed on ABC’s 20/20, where he was asked to share details of his own apprehension and critique the robbery surveillance footage of other masterminds.