John (Jack) Xavier McCarthy was born in South Boston, Massachusetts, the oldest of four children. He later received a scholarship to Phillips Exeter Academy in New Hampshire. In the beginning of his senior year, his mother died in a car accident and in the following spring his father died suddenly from a heart attack. The day of his father's funeral Jack received a scholarship to attend Dartmouth college. At Dartmouth along with his other studies, he began his lifelong interest and study of poetry but dropped out of school as Alcohol intervened in his life. He started attending Alcoholic Anonymous meetings in 1962, stayed sober and returned to graduate from Dartmouth five years later (in 1967). He remained an active member of A.A. for the remainder of his life and would later write about his experiences in some of his best-known poems.

In 1968 he married Joan Reynolds (of Westwood, Massachusetts)in 1968, and had three daughters. He remained close with his children after he divorced in 1986. In 1989 he first met Carol Sinder after placing a personal ad. They were married in 1991 at St. Ann Church in Dorchester, Massachusetts.

McCarthy began writing poetry in the 1960s and was temporarily encouraged after his poem South Boston Sunday was published in a Sunday edition of the Boston Sunday Globe in October 1976. He was disappointed that its publication did not open up any doors for him and concentrated on his career as an information technologist working with banks and insurance companies. In 1993 he took his daughter, Kathleen, on her 17th birthday, to a poetry reading at the Cantab Lounge in Boston, Massachusetts, with the intention of getting her interested in poetry but wound up performing a poem and then returning to perform poetry in competition with other poets (Slam Poetry). This quickly led to some local recognition and he was asked to be part of the competitive Boston Slam Team that would compete in the National Slam Poetry competition in Portland, Oregon in 1996. The competition was filmed by Paul Devlin as part of the documentary SlamNation which was released in 1998 and McCarthy is interviewed and seen performing on stage during the film.

Jack became involved with the Seattle Slam Poetry and Seattle Spoken Word poetry communities and was invited to be one of the main-stage performers at the Washington Poets Association Burning Word Festival on Whidbey Island (Washington)in April 2006. That was also the year he started the Evergreen Invitational Poetry Slam which was held at the Evergreen Unitarian Church in Marysville, Washington (2006 through 2012). In October 2007 he was asked to perform one of his best-known poems; "Drunks" at the Costa Brava AA Convention held in Spain (they flew him there). In 2010 and 2011, he taught performance workshops for the MFA in poetry program at New England College in Henniker, New Hampshire. He remained active in the poetry community giving performances through November 2012. As he battled against cancer (since 2011)he prepared the manuscript for a collection of poetry and short prose pieces called Drunks and other poems of Recovery which was published posthumously by Write Bloody Publishing in 2013.

Jack McCarthy died in his sleep of complications from cancer surgery on the morning of January 17, 2013, in Seattle, Washington, with his wife Carol by his side.

(Source: Wikipedia, 2/27/2017)