Barbara Gregorich

Exit Velocity, Barbara’s most recent novel, features a working-class hero fighting for her life and a parrot on a mission from another planet. Exit Velocity is a Finalist for the 2025 Midland Authors Adult Fiction Award. Exit Velocity is also a Finalist for the Next Generation Indie Award for Best Social Justice Book.

From an early age Barbara determined to be either a baseball player or a writer. This led her to write She's on First, a novel about the first woman to play in the major leagues. From fiction she migrated to fact and wrote the award-winning Women at Play: The Story of Women in Baseball. For this research as well as for her other writings on women in baseball, Barbara received the 2024 SABR Dorothy Seymour Mills Lifetime Achievement Award.

Barbara published two mystery novels and then the well-regarded nonfiction book, Guide to Writing the Mystery Novel: Lots of Examples, Plus Dead Bodies. She also published a book she had long wanted to write — a biography of Earl Derr Biggers, a critical figure in the Golden Age of American mysteries. That book is Charlie Chan’s Poppa: Earl Derr Biggers.

She had always wanted to write a YA novel, and in 2020 she did. That novel, The F Words, was published by City of Light Publishing in 2021.

Now that Exit Velocity has been published Barbara is fine-tuning a work she calls her “mule book.” She is also contemplating writing a trilogy — an undertaking for which she feels both attraction and aversion.