James Ross Kelly lives in Northern California, beside the Sacramento River. He has been a journalist for Gannet, a travel book editor, and had a score of labor jobs — the in-between, jobs you get from being an English major. Logger, tree planter, factory worker, and construction has shaped his worldview. Most recently, he retired from a twenty career in Federal employment as a writer-editor and Environmental Planner for the U.S. Forest Service, where he spent the better part of the last decade in Alaska. He started writing poetry and stories in college, and after college continued and gave occasional readings in the Pacific Northwest during the 1980s. Mr Kelly raised his two sons, David and Joseph in Oregon and Alaska. His poems and stories have appeared in Westwind Review, (Ashland, Oregon), Open Sky(Seattle),The Sun (Chapel Hill, North Carolina) Siskiyou Journal (Ashland, Oregon), Don’t Read This,(Ashland, Oregon), Table Rock Sentinel, (Medford, Oregon), Poetry Motel (Duluth, Minnesota), Poems for a Scorpio Moon & Others (Ashland, Oregon), The Red Gate & Other Poems, a handset letterpress chapbook published by Cowan & Tetley (1984, Vancouver, B.C.), Silver Birch Press (Los Angeles) so glad is my heart(Duluth, Minnesota). Since retirement Mr. Kelly has been able to concentrate on his poems, and short stories, a novel, and a collection of Creative non-fiction memoir; of which "In Eritrea While Vietnam Raged" is one.