Pago Pago, AMERICAN SAMOA 

John Enright passed away on Tuesday, January 20, 2026 after a long illness. The following is an obituary he wrote for himself. His sister Rosemary who let us know of his passing, was not sure when it was written, possibly a decade ago:

“One of the great losses of the 19th century was that John was not born then. Enright, whose organic support systems finally surrendered sometime this past weekend, often expressed fondness for other centuries but was especially fond of the “freakish 19th” because “You know it was closest once and there was less stuff to translate.” In the immediate pre-digital, pre-Internet era Enright was among the first rank of poets in the number of verses neither published nor read by anyone else. He often asserted that he wasn’t “just practicing here” and famously once produced a profit/ loss spreadsheet showing how much a half-century of poesy had cost him.

His peripatetic life guaranteed a financially insecure old age, which he rejected in favor of an abused-substance-enhanced search for reality wormholes. ‘Maybe success is when we outlast our purpose,’ he once said. ‘I love the way the horses keep running after the race is done’.”

The first stanza of the final poem he sent me says it all:

I wandered out of childhood’s snow dusk streetlights,

Buffalo solo, trying to get lost, looking for some time

some place to escape into.

 Was anything they told us actual?

Was life just a list of tasks and tests?

 Was I just a dart in someone’s game?

Are our truths only what we distained unlearning?

(Enright, 2025)

John Enright was born in Buffalo, New York, in 1945, the fifth of six children in an Irish Catholic household. After fourteen years of Catholic schooling he served stints in semi-pro baseball and the Lackawanna steel mills before earning his B.A. degree from City College of New York night school while working full-time at Fortune, Time and Newsweek magazines. He later completed a master’s degree in Folklore at U.C. Berkeley and devoted the 1970s to the publishing industry in New York, San Francisco, and Hong Kong, serving as Managing Editor for Production at the University of California Press and establishing his own book production service, Independent Publishing, and Tinkers Dam Press.

In 1981, when Ronald Reagan became President, he fled the States to teach English, Literature, and Folklore at the American Samoa Community College in Pago Pago. He spent the next twenty-six years living on the islands of the South Pacific, working for environmental, cultural, and historical resource preservation.

John created and was the first head of the Samoa/ Pacific Studies Program at ASCC and served as President of the Faculty Senate. With National Endowment for the Arts funding he established and directed the Folk Arts Program at the American Samoa Arts Council.

He was a founder and president of Le Vaomatua, the Samoan environmental education non-profit organization, securing MacArthur Foundation funding for its operation. He was especially proud of his work with the Swedish Society for the Conservation of Nature in saving Savai’i rain forests.

John was appointed chairman of the American Samoa Historical Commission and later served for thirteen years as State Historic Preservation Officer, running that program with grants from the National Parks Service.

He was co-founder and president of the American Samoa writers’ association O Le Si’uleo o Samoa. During its twenty-year run he also served as publisher for its imprint, Rusty Staple Press, bringing out a half-dozen titles of members’ work.

John served as treasurer for the Samoa Voyaging Society, Aiga Tautai, and as treasurer and chairman of the South Pacific Academy’s board of directors. In 1995 he received the Governor’s Award for Excellence in the Arts. One of his favorite annual gigs was as pronouncer in the Samoa News Territorial Spelling Bee.

In 2007, John and his wife, the ceramicist and artist Connie Payne, retired to Jamestown, Rhode Island, where they lived until moving to Owensboro, Kentucky, in 2019. Following Connie’s death in 2022, John returned to Jamestown. He died there after a long illness on January 20, 2026.

Over the past five decades, John’s essays, articles, short stories, and poems have appeared in more than ninety books, anthologies, journals, periodicals, and online magazines. Eight books were published after his retirement, including his acclaimed Jungle Beat Mysteries series, featuring his Samoan detective, Apelu Soifua. His collection of poems from Samoa, 14 Degrees South, won the University of the South Pacific Press’s inaugural International Literature Competition.

He is survived by his son Liam with his first wife, the late Sinavaiana Carolyn Gabbard. Liam and his wife Clarissa live in Austin Texas with their two children Nikki, and Roman.

John will be mourned by friends around the world.