Paul JJ Payack (1950- ), author, educator, media commentator (pseudonym The WordMan). Born Morristown, NJ; educated at Bucknell and Harvard Universities. Co-founder of yourDictionary.com and founder of the Global Language Monitor. (See the Wikipedia article on the Global_Language_Monitor.)

His creative works often involve various aspects of language. These include ‘meta-histories’ that describe the invention of the Zero; essays on the invention of the infinity symbol (the "Dustbin Of History"), the history of chess, and the Ides of March; as well as ‘metafictions’ that describe ‘the Dream-table, ’ ‘the Versificators,’ and ‘Mythomania’.

Payack has authored hundreds of what The Paris Review called “prose poems,” The Kansas City Star, “polyphonic prose,” and Contemporary Authors, “metafiction”. Payack’s metafiction has appeared in hundreds of journals, anthologies, and collections including The Paris Review, New Letters, and Boulevard. Payack’s oeuvre currently consists of some 1000 creative works.

He has also authored more than a dozen 'collage narratives,' or 'wordless metafictions'.

Recent works include Conversations with The WordMan, and Other Words on Words (2004), A Plague of Darkness, or The Unseen and the Unseeable (2003), the play, Worlds to Shatter, Shattered Worlds (2003) , Children of the Mind: An Extended Metafiction, (2002), and The Idea Mine: A Short Note on Metafiction (2000). His earliest collections include A Ripple in Entropy (1974) and Mythomania (1976).

In her introduction to Mythomania, Sylvia Leah Berkman described his style as, "The brief, almost bald, summation of crucial experience that attains it power through its stark reductiveness."