James Mazza

James Mazza has been in Emergency Medical Services for nearly twenty years. He started at nineteen as a volunteer with no CPR card and a hand-me-down coat that did not fit. He is currently the Chief of EMS at Montclair Ambulance Unit, a nonprofit 911 agency in Montclair, New Jersey, where he has led a team of more than seventy EMTs responding to over five thousand calls a year.

He is the NAEMT EMS Advocate of the Year 2025 and the New Jersey Prehospital Administrator of the Year 2024. He serves as Director at Large for the International Association of EMS Chiefs, as the NAEMT New Jersey State Advocacy Coordinator, and as a member of NJ Task Force 1 Urban Search and Rescue and the New Jersey EMS Task Force, having deployed to disasters across the country.

He holds a Master of Arts in Emergency and Disaster Management and a Bachelor of Arts in Political Science.

The New EMT Survival Guide is his first book. Fifty percent of net profits go to Montclair Ambulance Unit.

He still has no idea why he keeps coming back to this job. But he can tell you the truth about it.