John Tripoulas was born and grew up in Cleveland, Ohio, and as a teenager attended high school in Athens, Greece. He graduated from Oberlin College with a B.A. in English, and spent a year with the Ringling Brothers Circus as an elephant driver. Eventually he returned to Greece, where he earned an M.D. from the University of Athens Medical School. From 2009 to 2016 he served as general surgeon on the Greek island of Ikaria, where his father and paternal grandparents were born. He has also worked as an attending surgeon in hospitals in Athens, Piraeus, and Nafplion, Greece. In 2011 he published in a bilingual edition his translation of a volume of poems by his maternal grandfather, the Greek poet and Olympic medalist Demetrios Golemis: Demolished Souls (Cosmos Publishing Company, 2011). The first collection of his own poems, A SOUL INSIDE EACH STONE, was published by the Dos Madres Press in 2016, and in a Greek bilingual edition, with translation by Socrates Kabouropoulas (Rodakio Press, 2018).