Jeffrey L. Staley

I grew up on the Navajo Indian Reservation in northeastern Arizona, fourteen miles from the nearest highway, twenty-five miles from a post office, and fifty-five miles from the closest high school in Shiprock, New Mexico--from which I graduated. My father was the principal of a two-room fundamentalist Protestant Indian boarding school, and he was my elementary school teacher for four of eight grades. I have written briefly about my childhood in my 1995 book, "Reading with a Passion: Rhetoric, Autobiography, and the American West in the Gospel of John" (Chapter Five: Not Yet Fifty). I have now completed a draft of a memoir entitled "Indian Boy: An American Memoir."

I am a New Testament scholar by trade, having received a PhD from the Graduate Theological Union in Berkeley, and then having taught for over thirty years in the Pacific Northwest. I am now happily retired.

I have been interested in family history for many years, and when I married into a Chinese American family, I became fascinated with my mother-in-law's family history. As a result, I published my first work of fiction based on research into my wife's grandmother's story. The novel is entitled "Gum Moon. A Novel of San Francisco Chinatown," and is available from Amazon and from your favorite local independent bookstore.

Having finished a memoir of my childhood on the Navajo Reservation, I am now working on a series of family history essays that go back to the mid-1700s on both my mother and father's sides of the family.

Two of the photographs on the right show me with favorite authors. The first is of me with Dr. Seuss's (Theodor Geisel's) "Horton" from the book "Horton Hears a Who." The photograph was taken in Geisel's hometown of Springfield, MA. Horton's declaration, that "A person's a person, no matter how small," had a big influence on me as a child, since I was always quite short for my age.

Mark Twain is my favorite American author--along with John Updike. One of my favorite Twain quotes is the following: "Get your facts first, then you can distort them as you please." It works for memoir and well as historical fiction!