John Nova Lomax

John Nova Lomax was a senior editor with Texas Monthly from 2015 to 2019.

He was an oyster shucker in Tennessee, a landscape gardener and British Telecom mail clerk in Lancashire, and a field hand on a kibbutz in the Arava section of the Negev in Israel. He also authored Houston’s Best Dive Bars: Drinking and Diving in the Bayou City, a guidebook to Houston dive bars, and coauthored Murder & Mayhem in Houston: Historic Bayou City Crime, a compilation of notorious Houston crimes. 

Lomax was a full-time journalist in the Bayou City from 2001 until shortly before his death in 2023. He spent eleven years at the Houston Press as a music editor and staff writer and was proudest of helping discover Hayes Carll, helping rediscover Lil’ Joe Washington, and winning an ASCAP Deems Taylor Award in 2008. With future Marfa city councilman and justice of the peace David Beebe, Lomax walked a total of more than two hundred miles of Houston streets on about a dozen different trips, writing about the adventures as part of the “Sole of Houston” blog series. After leaving the music beat, Lomax covered crime, courts, and culture for the Press. His work also appeared in Spin, the New York Times, the Village Voice, and LA Weekly.