Biography
Other info : Bibliography
Jean-Pierre Desthuilliers, born in Versailles, is a French writer and poet.
Jean-Pierre Desthuilliers went to high school at the collège Albert de Mun, at Michel Bouts' école du Gai Savoir, a school based on the principles of active learning, then at the co-ed lycée of Meaux, now Lycée Henri Moissan. In 1956, he entered a classes préparatoires aux grandes écoles, a two-year preparatory course for enrollment in one of France's “grandes écoles” at Paris' Lycée Henri-IV.[2] Having graduated from ENSICA as an engineer in 1962,[3] he spent twenty years working as an executive in the industrial sector and for a private firm running public services. After that, he became associate manager at Bossard Consultants.[4] There, he contributed to develop social dynamics under Jean-Christian Fauvet's supervision. In 1992, he created a consultancy firm specialised in instructional design and based in Boulogne-Billancourt.[5]
He began to write in 1954, encouraged by the poet Jehan Despert who published some of his work in his Cahiers de l'Île de France[6] and got him a column in the daily newspaper Figaro[7]
Since 1959, he has worked with cultural associations, among which:
- from 1962 to 1974 the youth club (“Maison des Jeunes et de la Culture”), then the cultural center of Chelles where he worked with playwright, singer and actor Michel Heim, among others;
- from 1978 to 1983 the ACILECE, a teachers' bookselling and publishing cooperative that was founded by writer and poet Maurice Fombeure;
- since 1983, the association La Jointée, which publishes the literary review Jointure, which he founded along with Jacques Arnold,[8] Georges Friedenkraft, Daniel Sauvale and several other poets, and where he held the position of president and treasurer for several years;
- since 2004 the Aire-Falguière theatre which he administrates.
Jean-Pierre Desthuilliers belongs to the Société des poètes français, the French Poets Society.
Besides his professional and literary work, he is involved in various types of political and social action. In particular:
- from 2002 to 2008 he was neighbourhood councillor in the town of Boulogne-Billancourt, where he lives.;[9]
- as a representative of the ENSICA alumni, he played a role in merging the engineering schools SUPAERO and ENSICA, which formed the ISAE (Space and Aeronautics Institute) in 2007, and in merging the two alumni associations,[10] into the “Amicale ISAE,” which he administrates.
