John Tallmadge grew up in northern New Jersey. He credits his urban upbringing with instilling in him "a childhood longing for lakes and forests".^[1] He increasingly experienced the natural world at Dartmouth College and visiting Big Sur and the High Sierra while in the Army. Those experiences encouraged him to explore nature writers like Thoreau and John Muir. The outdoors complimented the academic work that he was pursuing and he applied his graduate studies in comparative literature to his passion for the outdoors.

His studies in nature writing fall under the genre of ecocriticism, a term coined by William Rueckert in 1978, and focus on the works of Thoreau, John Muir, Edward Abbey, and Aldo Leopold.

He served in the United States Army in California in the late 1960s in a Russian language program.^[2]

Tallmadge is married. He lives with his family in Cincinnati.

Tallmadge graduated from Dartmouth College in 1969 before^[3] the "Army preempted grad school." He received his PhD from Yale University in 1977 in comparative literature. He proceeded to teach at Yale, the University of Utah, Carleton College, the Associated Colleges of the Midwest, and Dartmouth College, before settling at TUI. He served as a dean there from 1987 to 1992.^{[citation needed]}

Tallmadge worked as a consultant in developing curricula at Green Mountain College, University of Kentucky, and Antioch University New England. He consulted at Concordia College, Chatham College, the Roger Tory Peterson Institute, and the Cincinnati Museum of Natural History and Science. He offers workshops on the themes of nature and human values, spirituality, and writing, as well as seminars on personal and professional development for college faculty.

Tallmadge has been published in the Utne Reader, Orion magazine, Audubon Magazine, Whole Terrain, the Michigan Quarterly Review, the Interdisciplinary Studies in Literature and Environment (ISLE), the North Dakota Quarterly, the Emerson Society Quarterly, and Witness.^{[citation needed]}

• Leslie, Clare Walker, John Tallmadge, and Tom Wessels. Into the Field: A Guide to Locally Focused Learning (Orion Society, 2005). ISBN 0-913098-52-3
• Tallmadge, John. Meeting the Tree of Life: A Teacher's Path (University of Utah Press, 1997). ISBN 0-87480-531-7
• Tallmadge, John, and Harry Harrington, eds. Reading Under the Sign of Nature: New Essays in Ecocriticism (University of Utah Press, 2000). ISBN 0-87480-648-8
• Tallmadge, John. The Cincinnati Arch: Learning from Nature in the City (University of Georgia Press, 2004). ISBN 0-8203-2676-3

• A Matter of Scale
• Deerslayer with a Degree
• Meeting the Tree of Life
• Narrative Ecocriticism
• The Nature of Terror
• The Wild Within
• Toward a Natural History of Reading

• Defining Ecocritical Theory and Practice
• Primer for Outdoor Educators from ERICDigests.org Archived 2021-04-16 at the Wayback Machine
• Union Institute and University Network recently published books Winter 2004-2005
• University of Georgia Books
• Whole Terrain profile of John Tallmadge

• Whole Terrain link to Tallmadge's articles published in Whole Terrain
• Whole Terrain podcasts on nature and nature writing 1. Thoreau, 2. Where is Nature?, 3. On Nature Writing
• Grand Rapids Community College Sustainability Series podcasts. 1. Creative Sustainability lecture, 2. Reading from The Cincinnati Arch
• Guest on *Anyplace Wild TV Show, Season 3, Episode 3: Chasing Thoreau's Ghost: Canoeing and Hiking in Maine
• Blog: The Staying Alive Project for faculty development