James Shell

James Shell's thirty-year writing career has reached a high point with the publication of We Were Pirates (currently available on amazon.com), co-written with Robert Schultz, his first published full-length work. Shell's long list of publication credits includes fiction, non-fiction, and poetry, published in The Roanoke Times, College Poetry Review, Jazz, Single Living, Ideas at Work, Artemis, Raconteur, GlennGould, and The University of Toronto Quarterly. An excerpt from We Were Pirates was published in the December issue of Naval History magazine, and another excerpt was published in the latest issue of World War II History magazine. In August, he had the honor of speaking at The Library of Congress with Robert Schultz and Bob Hunt, as part of the Library's Veterans History Project.

Among his most notable past publications are: "Bud Powell 1924-1966," "Thelonious Monk 1917-1982," and "Bill Evans 1929-1980," a triptych of poems about three great jazz pianists; the short stories "Women Who Wear Glasses" and "The Memorial Album"; "Glenn Gould and Jazz," the first article to be specially commissioned by the international Glenn Gould Foundation and subsequently translated into Spanish for publication in the Spanish magazine Mas Jazz; and "Northrop Frye and Music," a groundbreaking essay which made use of previously unpublished material from the great literary critic's notebooks and correspondence.

Shell is currently at work on a family memoir, tentatively titled Where We Start From (after the line in T.S. Eliot's "Four Quartets," "The end is where we start from").