John A. Glusman is vice president and editor-in-chief of W. W. Norton and Company, the largest independent, employee-owned publisher in the United States. He received his B.A. from Columbia College in 1978, and an M.A. from the Graduate School of Arts & Sciences at Columbia University in 1980. He has taught at The New School for Social Research, the graduate writing program at Columbia University, and he has written for numerous publications, among them, the Virginia Quarterly Review, The Economist, Rolling Stone, Washington Journalism Review, and Travel + Leisure. At W. W. Norton & Company, his authors include New York Times bestselling authors Neil deGrasse Tyson, Frans de Waal, and Ronan Farrow, Pulitzer Prize winners Richard Powers, David Rohde, and William Taubman, National Book Critics Circle Award winner and MacArthur "Genius" Fellow Saidiya Hartman, National Book Critics Circle Award winner John Lahr, Pulitzer Prize finalist James M. Scott, Thomas Chatterton Williams, and Robert Coover.

In 2001 he visited the Philippines with his father, Murray Glusman, and that trip marked the beginning of his field research for Conduct Under Fire. He lives in Bedford, New York with his wife, Emily Bestler, Editorial Director of Emily Bestler Books at Atria/Simon & Schuster, with whom he has three adult children.