James Garrison

Born in Statesville, North Carolina, James (Jim) Garrison attended the University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill, where he nurtured his interest in creative writing, and Duke University Law School, where he was drafted into the U.S. Army after his first year. Arriving home from Vietnam on Christmas morning in 1970, he returned to Duke Law School the next month. After graduation from Duke and marriage to his best friend, June, he set out on a first career practicing utilities law in a boutique law firm in Fayetteville, North Carolina. Seeking a calmer and less stressful environment than criminal law and jury trials, he joined Texaco Inc.’s legal department in Atlanta, as a corporate attorney. When that office closed, he ended up in Texaco’s regional office in Houston, Texas—as a labor and employment lawyer representing the company in various legal proceedings in Federal and state courts and agencies and in labor arbitrations, as well as in other areas of legal strife. Not exactly calm and low-stress work. His last position at Texaco was Associate General Counsel for Regulatory matters with a Texaco/Shell/Saudi Aramco partnership for downstream operations in the U.S. Following a corporate merger, he decided to stay home for the kids, one an artist living in Berlin, Germany, the other a lawyer in Delaware—just in case they called. That’s when he started working on his first novel, QL 4, based on his experiences as a military policeman in the Mekong Delta during the Vietnam War.

Published by TouchPoint Press in 2017, QL 4 has received several awards, including a silver medal for literary fiction from the Military Writers Society of America and placed as a finalist for the 2018 Montaigne Medal. His early law career led to a few bizarre civil and criminal cases that exposed him to characters from diverse backgrounds and professions and provided fodder for The Safecracker, his second novel published by TouchPoint Press in 2019. His third novel, What Seems True, was inspired by a true crime in Port Arthur, Texas, in 1979, a crime for which the shooter was never convicted. His short stories and poems have appeared in online literary magazines and anthologies and his poem “Lost: On the Staten Island Ferry” was nominated for a 2018 Pushcart prize.

His wife and still best friend, June, is a clarinetist who would have preferred he not stay home for the kids. Apart from reading good literature and writing, Jim’s interests include travel, hiking in the mountains of North Carolina and Colorado, and good food, preferably with candlelight and a nice, reasonably priced wine.

Jim Garrison is a recovering lawyer who lives and writes in Houston, Texas.

Author Website: https://jamesdgarrison.wordpress.com/

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