Dr. John Wesley Fiero was born on June 20, 1934 in Bronxville, NY. After serving honorably as an electronics technician in the U.S. Navy from 1953-1957, he earned his Ph.D. at Florida State University. From 1969-1998, he was a member of the faculty at the University of Southwestern Louisiana (now University of Louisiana at Lafayette), retiring with the rank of Professor Emeritus. He married Dr. Gloria Fiero and they had two sons.

As an educator, Dr. Fiero specialized in English Renaissance literature, particularly Shakespeare, history of theater, and dramatic writing. Dr. Fiero was a driving force in the Lafayette theater world, authoring numerous plays, and bringing some of them to New York and London after they premiered in Louisiana. He was a founding member of the Lafayette Community Theatre in the 1980s, and played a large part in forming Eavesdrop Theatre, which ran from the mid-1970s to the early 1990s. Over the years, he directed several plays in Lafayette, most notably The Tempest and Othello. Later in his life, he worked with Cite des Arts, Theatre 810, and Elsa Dimitriadis and Brady McKellar’s Wanderlust Productions.