Jim Gregory

Jim Gregory's fifth book, "Will This Be on the Test? Reflections from a History Teacher," is a collection of personal essays and nonfiction stories, is about family, Arroyo Grande and national history and about teaching history.

His fourth book on San Luis Obispo County History, "Central Coast Aviators in World War II," was released in May 2018 by The History Press.

His third book, "San Luis Obispo County Outlaws: Desperados, Vigilantes and Bootleggers," was published in October 2017 and was selected as a first-place winner in Western Nonfiction for the 2018 National Indie Excellence Awards, and association for independent, small-press and self-published writers.

His second book on the history of the Arroyo Grande Valley, "Patriot Graves: Discovering a California Town's Civil War Heritage," was named a finalist in the 2017 Next Generation Indie Book Award; "World War II Arroyo Grande" appeared in 2016.

You can learn more about his books at www.arroyograndehistory.com

Gregory taught classes in literature and the social sciences, including AP U.S. History and AP European History, for thirty years at Mission College Preparatory School in San Luis Obispo, California, and at Arroyo Grande High School.

He, with his brother and two sisters, was raised in the Upper Arroyo Grande Valley and attended the two-room Branch Elementary School. He then studied journalism and history at Cuesta College; the University of Missouri-Columbia, where he received his bachelor's degree; and at Cal Poly State University-San Luis Obispo.

He was an editor at ABC-Clio in Santa Barbara and a newspaper reporter in San Luis Obispo before becoming a teacher. He has also worked as a research historian for the San Luis Obispo County Historical Society.

Gregory was the Lucia Mar Unified School District's Teacher of the Year in 2009-10. In 2004, he received a Gilder-Lehrman Fellowship to study the Depression and New Deal with Pulitzer Prize-winning Stanford University professor David Kennedy, an experience that only deepened his fascination with the 1930s and 1940s. He has led several student trips to Europe, including visits to many of the villages and cities where young Americans fought in 1944-45.

He has taught classes on descriptive writing for young people and on historical research and writing as part of the Central Coast Writers Conference in San Luis Obispo. He presently teaches online courses on San Luis Obispo County history for Cuesta College.

He is the incoming president of the South County Historical Society.

Jim is married to Elizabeth, a teacher and campus minister at St. Joseph High School in Santa Maria, and the father of two sons, John and Thomas. The Gregory family shares increasingly precious space in their Arroyo Grande home with one Basset hound, two Irish setters, one tortoise and a small army of cats.