James Sullivan was born and raised in Quincy, Massachusetts, and has an MFA from the Iowa Writers’ Workshop, where he received the coveted James Michener/Paul Engle Fellowship. . He lives with his family on Casco Bay, Maine, a few miles from the birthplace of film director John Ford, who steamed into Omaha Beach on the destroyer USS Plunkett. Sullivan’s new book about the star-crossed ship, Unsinkable: Five Men and the Indomitable Run of the USS Plunkett will be published in December by Scribner.
Sullivan is the author of a memoir, Over the Moat, which the Washington Post called an “essential entry in the canon of expatriate literature and Robert Olen Butler praised as ”redolent of our universal humanity…an important book.” Sullivan is also the author of a travel book about Vietnam for National Geographic, entitled National Geographic Traveler: Vietnam. His feature stories have been published in the New York Times, Robb Report and National Geographic Traveler magazine. He started his career in journalism at the Portland Press Herald in 1987.