About the Goblin
My name is Joshua M. Neff.
I was born on December 24, 1969, in San Francisco, California. My parents lived in Berkeley. No, they weren’t hippies. During my birth, I turned myself around and refused to come out “the right way.” This says a lot about me. After a year, my parents–for the first of many times in my life–pulled up stakes and moved. We eventually settled in the suburbs of Detroit, where my brother Jeremy was born.
I still have some clear memories of my early youth. I remember going to see Winnie the Pooh and Tigger Too! and crying when we got home because “Rabbit made Tigger stop bouncing.” This says a lot about me.
My parents split up when I was four. We stayed in the Detroit area for a while, but in the middle of first grade, my mother moved us to Long Island, New York. My father moved to an apartment in Queens. After a few years, my mother moved us again, to Iowa City, Iowa, for a year and then to Kansas City, Missouri. In an attempt to stay relatively close to us, my father moved to Joliet, Illinois. In the years of second grade through fifth grade, I discovered and became fascinated with superhero comics, comic strips from the 1920s-40s, old radio shows, the Pulps and cartoons from the Golden Age of American animation. This says a lot about me.
I spent all of middle school in Kansas City, lived with my dad in Joliet for the first two years of high school, lived with my mother in Cambridge, England, for a year, and finally graduated from high school in Shawnee Mission, Kansas. If you’re from New York and have no idea what the rest of America is like, no, Shawnee Mission isn’t an Indian reservation. A couple of years after I graduated from high school, my mother adopted my sister, Rachel. My sister currently spells her name Raychelle. Go figure.
I got my undergraduate degree in English at the University of Iowa, focusing on the English Renaissance, American Postmodernism and creative writing. For most of my undergrad years I worked at the checkout desk and in the Circulation Department of the main library. This is important. After college, I taught English as a Foreign Language in Ecuador and Japan, worked in the office of a small chain bookstore in North Carolina, and eventually resettled in Kansas City. After slogging through years of retail, I got a job in the Kansas City, Kansas Public Library system. I tried teaching high school English and hated it. I went back to libraries and loved it. I decided to get a Masters degree and be a full-fledged librarian.
I moved to Milwaukee and got my Masters in Library and Information Studies from the University of Wisconsin-Milwaukee. This is important. I also met Julie, who became my wife, and Morgan, who became my daughter. This is even more important.
I returned to the Kansas City area with Julie and Morgan, where I got a job as the Adult Services librarian at the Indian Creek Branch of the Olathe Public Library. After a year and a half there, I moved to the Johnson County Library to join the Web Content team as a Web Content Developer. At JCL, I oversee (and co-designed) the children’s site, JoCoKids, oversee the teen site, JoCoTeenScene, contribute to the main JoCoLibrary site (mostly Homework Help and Teacher’s Lounge) and write a staff picks review blog, Astonishing Tales. In 2007, I co-created the Library Society of the World.
Any questions? Email or IM me and ask.
