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Jan Adkins was born in West Virginia. His father was a sheet-metal contractor in Wheeling and his mother was a housewife. He attended public school in St. Clairsville, Ohio, and studied architecture at Ohio State University, apprenticing as a designer for several years. He later took creative writing courses and combined the two into a career of writing books telling how things work, aiming them at young people. He has written books on a staggering variety of subjects, from gardening to illustrating to construction equipment to biographies of famous persons and just about everything in between.
He spent nine years as associate art director at "National Geographic" magazine, writing on such subjects as the space shuttle, forest fires, volcanoes and nuclear physics and headed a team of field researchers, occasionally going on field studies himself. He was written scripts for shows aired on The Discovery Channel, Nova and the BBC and taught illustration at the prestigious Rhode Island School of Design and the Maryland Institute's College of Art. He has been a contributing editor for "The Smithsonian" magazine and a columnist for "Chesapeake Bay" magazine.
