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John Willingham is an American writer and editor known for his novel The Last Woman, for his collections of reviews about honors programs at public universities in the United States, for his essays about history, literature, politics, and religion, and for The Edge of Freedom: A Fact-Based Novel of the Texas Revolution. The Revolution was his subject once more in his paper "Should We Forget the Alamo?: Myths, Slavery, and the Texas Revolution (2023). In 2011, he founded and became editor of Public University Honors, a website that evaluates more than 50 college honors programs and provides information about honors programs in general.
He is opposed to numerical rankings of colleges or honors programs, asserting in the 2018 edition that "Rankings presume a perfection that they cannot meet." His reviews place programs in groups, with the top group of 10 or so receiving the highest rating.
Willingham has been a contributor to the History News Network, which has published about two dozen of his essays and opinion pieces. During the same period, his work appeared in a variety of publications including The Texas Observer online, Religion Dispatches, and the San Antonio Express-News.
Born in Waco, Willingham graduated from Richfield High School and holds a bachelor's degree with honors and a master's degree in history from the University of Texas at Austin. He served as McLennan County, Texas, elections administrator from 1984 through 1992, and Williamson County, Texas, Elections Administrator from 1993 through 2009. In September 1998, he served as an Organization for Security and Cooperation in Europe (OSCE) election coordinator for the general election in the district of Brcko, under the dual sovereignty of Bosnia and Serbia. From 2001–05, he was a member of the National Task Force on Election Reform made up of state and local election officials. Assisted by funding related to the Help America Vote Act of 2002, the task force worked to improve the security and integrity of U.S. elections.
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