John Twelve Hawks

Twelve Hawks states that he has never met his editor, and that he communicates using the Internet and an untraceable satellite phone, usually employing a voice scrambler. All biographical information about his background is based on five sources: a 2005 article in USA Today, a 2005 interview by Rob Bedford in SFF World, a 2006 interview published in Germany in Der Spiegel, a portion of a 2007 Daily Telegraph article about popular writers, a 2008 Q&A interview on the blog of Joseph Mallozzi, one of the writers and producers of Stargate SG-1 and the Stargate:Atlantis television series.

Twelve Hawks' initial biography on the Random House website was only one line: "John Twelve Hawks lives off the grid."

John Twelve Hawks is his "adopted" name, but in the Spiegel interview he states he is not an American Indian. During an online conversation John Twelve Hawks had with his fans on his new website he explained the origin of his name: The real story is this… I was walking through a forest… Encountered a hawk nesting area… And 12 hawks circled around my head for about ten minutes…. So close that the tip of their wings bushed the side of my head. That was why I picked the named. REAL hawks. Not symbolic ones.

In the Spiegel interview he talks about visiting East Germany before the fall of the Berlin Wall. In the USA Today article, his response to a question about religion began with, "When I was in my twenties..." and when an editor asked him whether the "realm of hell" could be compared to current conditions in Iraq, Hawks replied "it's more like Beirut in the '70s". In the Spiegel interview and in the London Telegraph article, Hawks states that he drives a 15-year-old car and that he does not own a television. These personal facts and a description of JTH's unique lifestyle were confirmed in the 2008 Joseph Mallozzi Weblog interview.

The SFF World interview indicates that Twelve Hawks lived in a commune and learned about literature by stealing books from a restricted university library and then returning the books the next day. In the same interview, he states he wrote The Traveler after passing through some sort of personal crisis. In the interview in SFF World Twelve Hawks claims that he has "no plans to go public" regarding his identity.

In the audiobook version of "The Traveler", there is an interview with John Twelve Hawks where he mentions that he has done martial arts for years. According to Twelve Hawks' agent, Joe Regal, "He lives in New York, Los Angeles and London". The Traveler sets its story in all three of these locations.