John Roche lives in Albuquerque, where he helps run the Poetry Playhouse with Jules Nyquist. He  continues to teach for Rochester Institute of Technology.

His first full-length poetry collections were On Conesus (2005) and Topicalities (2008), both from FootHills Publishing, Kanona, NY. His 2011 poetic memoir, Road Ghosts, is available from theenk Books (through SPDBooks.org).  Albuquerque's Beatlick Press published an anthology of 120 poets called Mo' Joe (2014), inspired by his Joe Poems: The Continuing Saga of Joe the Poet (FootHills, 2012). Mo’ Joe was a finalist in the 2014 Arizona/New Mexico Book Awards and was nominated for a Pushcart Prize.

He also edited the collection Uncensored Songs for Sam Abrams (Spuyten Duyvil, 2008), co-edited an anthology of poems by Auburn Prison inmates with Patricia Roth Schwartz, and edited Martha Rittenhouse Treichler’s Black Mountain to Crooked Lake: Poems 1948-2010, with a Memoir of Black Mountain College (FootHills, 2010).  He is now editing a series of issues-themed anthologies called Poets Speak, which include Trumped, Hers, Water, Walls, and Survival.