James Ross Kelly lives in Northern California next to the Sacramento River. He has been a journalist for Gannet, a travel book editor, and had a score of labor jobs—the in-between, jobs you get from being an English major. He started writing poetry and short stories in college on the GI Bill, after college he continued and gave occasional readings in the Pacific Northwest during the 1980s. Mr. Kelly worked as an environmental writer for the USDA Forest Service in Oregon and Southeast Alaska where he retired in 2012. Born in Kansas, Mr. Kelly was a long-time resident of Southern Oregon where he grew up. His poems and stories have appeared in Westwind Review, (Ashland, Oregon), Open Sky (Seattle), Siskiyou Journal (Ashland, Oregon), The Sun (Chapel Hill, North Carolina); Don’t Read This (Ashland, Oregon), Table Rock Sentinel, (Medford, Oregon), Poetry Motel (Duluth, Minnesota), Poems for a Scorpio Moon & Others (Ashland, Oregon), The Red Gate & Other Poems, a handset letterpress chapbook published by Cowan & Tetley (Vancouver, B.C. Canada). In the past three years Silver Birch Press (Los Angeles, California), so glad is my heart (Duluth, Minnesota), Cargo Literary, (Prince Edward Island, Canada), Fiction Attic, Rock and Sling (Spokane, Washington), Edify (Helena, Alabama), Flash Fiction (San Francisco), Rue Scribe (New Mexico), True Chili (New Mexico), and  The Purpled Nail, have all featured one or more of his stories or poems. And the Fires We Talked About published by UnCollected Press in 2020 was Mr. Kelly’s first book of fiction. UnCollected Press has announced in September, a book of poems by Mr. Kelly, Black Ice & Fire to be published in December 2020. Mr. Kelly's newest book is Above Neil Rock: Stories and Poems, a memoir, published in August 2024.