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| Born in Philadelphia in 1947, James Morrow spent his teenage years in Hillside Cemetery, not far from Philadelphia. While such an adolescence might bespeak a morbid frame of mind, in Jim's case the explanation lies in his passion for 8mm moviemaking. Before going off to college, he and his friends used their favorite graveyard locale for a half-dozen horror and fantasy films, including adaptations of Coleridge's "The Rime of the Ancient Mariner" and Poe's "The Tell-Tale Heart."
After receiving degrees from the University of Pennsylvania and Harvard University, Jim channeled his storytelling urge toward the production of prose fiction. His breakout novel was a satire on the nuclear arms race, This Is the Way the World Ends, which became a Nebula nominee. His next dark comedy, Only Begotten Daughter, chronicled the escapades of Jesus Christ's divine half-sister in contemporary Atlantic City. It shared the 1991 World Fantasy Award with Ellen Kushner's Thomas the Rhymer. Throughout the 1990's Jim devoted his literary energies to killing God, an endeavor he pursued through three interconnected novels. The first book in the Godhead Trilogy. Towing Jehovah, winner of the 1995 World Fantasy Award, recounts a supertanker captain's efforts to bury the two-mile-long corpse of God. Blameless in Abaddon finds a small-town, small-time Pennsylvania magistrate putting God on trial for crimes against humanity. In The Eternal Footman, a "plague of death awareness" descends on humankind after God's skull goes into geosynchronous orbit above Times Square. Having grown sick of his Creator, and vice-versa, Jim next attempted to dramatize the birth of the scientific worldview. The resulting historical epic, The Last Witchfinder, tells of Jennet Stearne, who makes it her life's mission to bring down the 1604 Parliamentary Witchcraft Act. Jim's latest novel, The Philosopher's Apprentice, relates the adventures of a failed philosophy student hired to implant a conscience in a mysterious young woman whose brain is a tabula rasa. In February, Tachyon Books will publish Jim's stand-alone novella, Shambling Towards Hiroshima, set in 1945 and dealing with a U.S. Navy scheme to leverage a Japanese surrender via a biological weapon that strikingly resembles Godzilla. Other recent projects by Jim include a set of Tolkien Lesson Plans, written in partnership with his wife, Kathy. Aimed at secondary school teachers who want to bring The Hobbit and The Lord of the Rings into their classrooms, this nine-unit curriculum is featured on the Houghton Mifflin website. Another Jim and Kathy collaboration appeared in April of 2007, The SWFA European Hall of Fame, which anthologizes sixteen Continental science fiction stories, each rendered into English via a three-way conversation among the author, the translator, and the editors. A full-time writer, James Morrow makes his home in State College, Pennsylvania, along with his wife and son. Every day, Jim plays a game called "Klingon" with his dog, Amtrak, a Doberman mix whom he and Kathy rescued from a train station in Orlando. More information can be found at his website: www.jamesmorrow.net
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