About Tom Warren

Thomas Franklin Warren likes to write about places and situations that he has experienced for a long time. The setting for his book An Old Caddie Looks Back: Reflections from a Town that Loves Golf . . . is Rockford, Illinois, Warren’s birthplace and home growing up. Another book, Discovering Lake Superior and the Western Upper Peninsula of Michigan, draws from decades of journal entries and experiences around the family cabin near Ontonagon, Michigan. His first fictional novel, Discovering Beloit: Stories Too Good to be True is about investigative journalism and what it seeks and finds in the southern Wisconsin community where he has lived since the Seventies.

And now comes another bit of fiction: The Learner: Confronting God, Golf, and Beyond. It is set in a community on the Wisconsin-Illinois border that Warren calls Belle Waters. (What a coincidence! People often call Beloit Bel-wah.) The story features a young minister grappling with the challenge of his new job while trying to master golf. Along the way he encounters a dynamic group of youngsters, the plight of homelessness, and–is it–love, or what?

Warren is Emeritus Professor of Education and youth studies at Beloit College. He was sports editor of the East Rockford High School newspaper long ago. In mid-career at Beloit he became active in a national group called the Association of Liberal Arts Colleges for Teacher Education, affectionately known by the challenging acronym AILACTE (pro-nounced Uh LACK tee). For eight years he was publications editor, overseeing the creation and distribution of newsletters, monographs, and books. The joys of writing.

Writing has been a delightful avocation for him during retirement. He is in the very early stage of a book called Cleaning the Basement.

Tom lives with his wife Anna Marie (“Mim”) in Beloit with frequent trips to their Upper Peninsula cabin and to Wheaton, Illinois, where they visit daughter Rachel, son-in-law David, and grand-children Jack and Will.