Jim Hartsell

Email

jhartsell1152@gmail.com

Biography

Like most of us, there are many descriptors that apply to me: husband, father, grandfather, voracious reader, and average hammer dulcimer player are a few of them. I also write, concentrating on Southern fiction and children’s books. During my seven decades I have lived in a total of three counties, all in East Tennessee, and all contiguous; in one of those counties is the farm that’s been in our family for five generations. I have deep roots in this area. My immediate family consists of my wife of 40+ years, my two children, their spouses, and, at the moment, a total of six grandchildren. I have been assured that six is it, but I remain skeptical. My wife and I share our home on House Mountain with a cat and two shelter dogs. My professional career was spent in education, working with teens in various treatment centers, locked units, residential facilities, and public school alternative classrooms. These decades spent with teens who were characterized as losers at best and dangerous at worst taught me much about resilience, strength, and bravery, and helped form the concept of the main character in the Boone series. It has been said that the problem with stereotypes isn’t that they aren’t true, but that they are incomplete. Certainly this is the case with the young people I spent so much time with, who are more like the rest of us than not. I have a beautiful family, all the necessities of life plus a few luxuries, a fine circle of friends, and time to write books, play music, and enjoy the moments as they present themselves one by one. By any measure that matters to me, I am a very wealthy man.

Experience

Published works – Boone Series: Coming of Age in Appalachia; a six-book series Novels: Rock, Paper, Scissors, and Tango Non-fiction: Glimpses Children's Books: Father and Sister Radish, Box of Toys, The Boy and His Mountain, The Noise in the Woods, That Doesn't Belong Here, and Way Up in a Tree