Larry Mike Garmon
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Larry Mike Garmon is the author of several young adult mysteries and thrillers as well as children's poetry and adult horror. He lives in Altus, Oklahoma, and is the creator of the fictional town of Junebug, Oklahoma 74666 and the Agatha Pixie Mystery stories.
Accompanying his writing career, Mr. Garmon is also a school teacher at Altus High School, where he teaches English, Mythology, and Speculative Fiction. Garmon has coined the words "data-cators' and "educational collectivism", the former referring to educators who rely on data as the basis of instruction and the later referring to the trend by the federal government to usurp the local control of education and supplant it with a "one-size-fits-all" approach to education.
Garmon is an award-winning Photojournalist.
Born in Altus, Oklahoma, in 1955, Garmon is a graduate of East High School, Cheyenne, Wyoming; the U.S. Naval Schools of Photography; Western Oklahoma State College, Altus; and Oklahoma Baptist University, Shawnee, Oklahoma, and has completed master's work at both the University of Central Oklahoma and the University of Oklahoma. He is pursuing a Ph.D. in Literature
Garmon's stories usually involve a close-knit group of teens who are often alienated from their parents and see little connection to the community in which they live. This is a result of his own alienation growing up in a military family. Garmon moved often during his childhood. He attended ten different schools (three high schools within one year) before graduating in 1973.
Garmon has little if anything to do with his childhood family and has said, "My family and I don't speak. I don't hold any anger towards any of them. I don't believe that somebody's family only comes from their blood or name. I have felt closer as well as more loved and respected by people in my life who not related to me by blood or name."
Because of his feelings of alienation, he spent much of his childhood writing stories and reading classics by Hawthorne, Poe, Dickens, and Irving as well as the pulp, horror, science fiction, and detective books of the 1960's. He was also influenced by the B-horror movies of the 1950's and '60's.
