Jim Beane was born in the District of Columbia and raised in the suburbs of Maryland. His people came from West Virginia and the tidal waters of Virginia. They were miners, farmers, fishermen, teachers, railroaders and construction workers. Jim attended the United States Coast Guard Academy for two years, pretended to attend the University of Maryland for six months and finally graduated from York College in 1976 with a degree in Criminology. He has travelled the expanse of the United States twice in trustworthy vehicles, flown to Europe, Mexico and Puerto Rico and worked as a laborer, dishwasher, painter, electrician, shirt salesman, bartender, forklift driver and teacher. For thirty-five years he worked at carpentry as his day job and has been writing stories since his teens. His stories have been published online and in print since 1996. Recent stories appear in The MacGuffin, El Portal, Bright Flash Literary Review and The Evening Street Review. His short story collection, By the Sea, by the Sea…, was published in 2019 by Wordrunners eChapbooks. His story Jeanette appeared in the anthology DC Noir. Ocean View appeared in Worker’s Write: tales from the construction site, the winner of the 2017 Tillie Olsen Award for creative writing. His debut novel, The Deadening, published by Mandel Vilar Press/Dryad Press will be released on November 11, 2024. He has worked with the Armed Services Arts Partnership as an instructor for their creative writing program. He is a Pushcart Prize nominee, a Virginia Center for the Creative Arts fellow, a sometimes workshop leader at the Writers Center in Bethesda, Maryland, and a mentor for the Veterans Writing Project. He lives west of Baltimore with his wife and family.
