Following his time at the University of Iowa, Swofford served as an English professor at Lewis and Clark College, where he taught a class in the school's "Inventing America" program, and St. Mary's College of California, until he sold the film rights to "Jarhead". Swofford has had articles, both fiction and non-fiction, published in "The New York Times", "Harper's", "Men's Journal", "The Iowa Review", and other publications. He is a Michener-Copernicus Fellowship recipient and currently teaches creative writing at West Virginia University. His first fictional novel, "Exit A", was published in January 2007. "Exit A" chronicles the life of a boy who grows up on an American Air Force Base in Japan and falls in love with the base general's daughter.