James A. Terry was born in Selma, Alabama in 1960. The son of a United Methodist pastor, he lived in several towns in central and south Alabama before graduating from high school in Mobile in 1979. James attended college and graduated with a history degree and a mathematics degree from Birmingham-Southern College. He went on to earn a Masters and PhD in Biomedical Engineering from the University of North Carolina – Chapel Hill. He worked as an Associate Professor at Tulane University for fifteen years teaching physics to radiology residents. James started a medical physics consulting firm, Enterprise Physics, LLC, and ran it for another fifteen years before selling it and moving to Pensacola, Florida. Currently he writes novels and recently became a Certified Prescribe Burn Manager – coursework completed at the Alabama Fire College in Tuscaloosa this past July.

James is the editor for a new book, Good News from Hale. The book features twelve sermons of his father, Rev. James Thomas Terry, and also includes over thirty photographs of Hale County by New Orleans photographer, Donald Olivares.