James Geary is author of the New York Times bestseller The World in a Phrase: A Brief History of the Aphorism, the second edition of which is published by the University of Chicago Press. He is also the author of Wit's End: What Wit Is, How It Works, and Why We Need It,  I Is an Other: The Secret Life of Metaphor and How It Shapes the Way We See the World, Geary's Guide to the World's Great Aphorists, and The Body Electric: An Anatomy of The New Bionic Senses. He is an adjunct lecturer in public policy at the Harvard Kennedy School. He has taught at the VII Foundation, Bennington College, Boston University, Brandeis University, the Faber Academy, Tufts University and the Harvard Extension School. He is the former deputy curator of the Nieman Foundation for Journalism at Harvard, where he edited Nieman Reports, and the former editor of the European edition of Time magazine.

Geary has performed, given talks and / or conducted writing workshops at, among other venues, TED, Live from the New York Public Library, the Bread Loaf Writer's Conference, the Sun Valley Writer’s Conference, the Edinburgh Book Festival, the Hay-on-Wye Festival, the Genoa Science Festival, the Chautauqua Institution and the Seoul Digital Forum.