James Buckley, Jr.

America’s top author of sports books for young readers, Buckley has written more than 50 books on sports for kids, including titles on baseball, football, NASCAR, soccer, the Olympics, and more. Among his recent or upcoming titles are Scholastic Year in Sports (Scholastic, 2009), The Scholastic Ultimate Guide to Football (Scholastic, 2009), Eyewitness Baseball (DK, 2010 re-issue), and Lou Gehrig: More Than Just a Ballplayer (Sterling, 2010). He has also written popular reference books and titles on nature, history, space, and cars. (Under the pseudonym of K.C. Kelley, he has written several dozen other sports books for The Child’s World and other school and library publishers.) His book-producing company, the Shoreline Publishing Group, has created more than 250 books for children and adults. Shoreline’s publishing partners include Scholastic, DK, Readers’ Digest, Triumph, Chelsea House, Chronicle, Barnes & Noble, and many more. Shoreline also produces the annual NFL.com Fantasy Football Preview magazine with Time Inc. Home Entertainment and the NFL.

In 2010, he started a new publishing company, Beach Ball Books, which creates and publishes nonfiction books for kids, mostly on sports.

Before starting Shoreline in 2000, Buckley was a senior editor at NFL Publishing, where he covered Super Bowls, helped start NFL.com, and created numerous children’s books on the league and its players. Prior to that, he was the editorial projects manager of Sports Illustrated, working on special sections on a wide variety of sports and major sports events. He has also been a newspaper columnist, a freelance writer, and the editor of several children’s magazines.

A member of the Society for American Baseball Research, he is very involved with sports in his community, serving as a coach for youth baseball and soccer, and working on the board of directors of the Santa Barbara Foresters. That summer wood-bat college-level team has won two national championships (2006 and 2008) and has been ranked in the national top four every year since 2003. Buckley’s work with the team includes producing the game program, raising funds, and calling games on the radio.

Buckley has a BA in English from the University of California at Berkeley and also studied at the Radcliffe Publishing Course at Harvard. He lives in Santa Barbara, California, with his wife Patty and their two children.

Here’s a (mostly complete) list of books written by James Buckley, Jr.

2011
Ultimate Guide to Basketball
Extreme Sports: Child's World (10 vols.)
MLS World of Soccer

2010
Eyewitness Baseball
50 Years of American Sports (co-author)
Scholastic Ultimate Guide to Baseball
Lou Gehrig: More Than Just a Ballplayer
Sports in America: Revised Edition

2009
Scholastic Year in Sports (co-author)
Scholastic Ultimate Guide to Football
Skating Superstars
Obsessed with Football
Super Bowl Fireworks
SmartCards: Soccer, Pirates, Horses

2008
Boys’ Life: Let’s Go Fishing
Boys’ Life: Nature Detectives
Boys’ Life: Real-Life Robots
Boys’ Life: Night Creatures
Greatest NFL & Super Bowl Records

2006
Scholastic Book of Firsts
SI Kids’ Amazing World of Sports
Obsessed with Baseball
NBA on the Inside

2005
Eyewitness NASCAR
Six Classic Ballparks
Perfect: The Story of Baseball’s 17 Perfect Games
Scholastic Book of Lists 2
(plus Canadian edition)
The Bathroom Companion
(plus French edition)
Unhittable (with DVD)
Greatest Sports Rivalries (co-author)
Young Stars of NASCAR

2001-2004
Bill Bradley
Eyewitness Super Bowl
Eyewitness World Series
G.I. Joe at D-Day
G.I. Joe at Pearl Harbor
Great Moments in Football
Great Moments in Hockey
Life in the Pits
Muhammad Ali
NFL Adventures: The Lost Cowboy Ghost
Scholastic Book of Lists 1
(plus Canadian and Australian editions)
Sports Immortals (co-author)
Speedway Superstars
Venus and Serena Williams
Visual Dictionary of Baseball