J. M. Miles

I was born in Corinto, Nicaragua, to an American in the Merchant Marine and a Nicaraguan woman. My family moved to California when I was three. My formal education culminated with a degree in Finance from San Diego State University and later a degree in Teaching from Saint Mary’s College which led to a fourth-grade teaching position in Oakland, California. My wife, Cassandra Coates, a high school English teacher, gave me a love of language, the classics, and literature in general. This somehow meshed with my lifelong love of classic Disney (the land, the cartoons, and the movies) and two nineteenth century authors, Lewis Carroll for his two Alice books, and Kenneth Grahame for his “Wind in the Willows”.

I'm a writer of children's stories and young adult books. Three of my books were published with the pseudonym, Tonton Jim listed as the author. Two of those books, Max and the Lowrider and Harold and the Hot Rod, were published by Dayton Publishing and illustrated by Ed Roxburgh. The third, the recently published Angels in Storybook Land, I again used my pseudonym.

Currently I write stories for children that include at least a bare mention of church and God, and sometimes Christianity. Mine is a modest goal: To show boys or girls that fictional characters have as part of their everyday lives, prayer, church, and faith in God. And if I, by the grace of God, attract a few dozen or a few thousand little readers to Christianity, I will be extremely pleased.

The Mighty Gods, Small as Cherubs series was begun several years back with the latest book being finished just recently. Hopefully, the classical gods are presented in such a way so as not to draw anyone away from the one true God. The books were fun to write (and hopefully to read) and gave me a chance to read up on several eras of earth's history.