John Kelin's interest in the JFK assassination and the first-generation critics dates to 1976, when he attended a lecture by Mark Lane.

Mr. Kelin met Vincent J. Salandria at a JFK conference in Dallas in 1998. When the conference ended they kept in touch, and soon collaborated on a collection of Salandria's writing called False Mystery. In late 1999 Mr. Salandria asked Kelin if he would be interested in having his assassination-related correspondence. "My wife will just burn it all as soon as I'm dead," Salandria told him, only half-joking. Kelin did want it and Salandria shipped it along. That material sparked Kelin's research into the first-generation critics, and Praise from a Future Generation is the result.

In 1994 Mr. Kelin co-founded Fair Play magazine on the then-fledgling World Wide Web. Fair Play was the first of what by now are many JFK-oriented sites. As the magazine's publisher and editor, he presented the work of many critics and writers, including Christopher Sharrett, James W. Douglass, and Joan Mellen. Fair Play highlights include Mr. Kelin's article "#5 Man," a topic explored in greater length in Praise from a Future Generation, and his 1999 interview with Kerry McCarthy, a cousin of John F. Kennedy's.

The author in Dealey Plaza, 2003. In the background
is the Texas School Book Depository building, from which
Lee Harvey Oswald allegedly shot JFK on November 22, 1963.

Mr. Kelin's assassination writing has also appeared in The Kennedy Assassination Chronicles. In 1999 he assembled and edited False Mystery, a collection of Vincent J. Salandria's early Warren Commission criticism. That same year he was a recipient of JFK Lancer's "New Frontier" award. He has been listed in several editions of the Master Researcher Directory.

During the 1980s Mr. Kelin was a reporter for public radio station WEMU in Ypsilanti, Michigan, and an associate producer at WXYZ-TV in Detroit. In the 1990s he was a contract technical writer for Sun Microsystems in California and Colorado. During this period his writing appeared in Seattle-based Sacred City, and several Web-based literary magazines.

Mr. Kelin lives in Colorado with his wife and two children. He writes daily, rides an Italian road bike, and volunteers as a crossing guard and at the Boulder Valley Humane Society.

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