About Jim McGavran
Jim McGavran grew up in Columbus, Ohio, where he graduated from Upper Arlington High School in 1959. He earned a B. A. in English from the College of Wooster in 1963. After a year of teaching English conversation in a lycee in Bordeaux, France, he completed an M. A. in English at Columbia University in 1965. He taught for two years at the College of William and Mary, where he met his wife Deje, now an English professor at Queens University of
Charlotte.
He then returned to graduate school and finished his Ph.D. in English at the
University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill in 1973, when he began his long teaching career
at UNC Charlotte. In 2006 he was the recipient of both the English Graduate Students
Association Teaching Award and the campus-wide Bank of America Teaching Excellence
Award. He is the editor of two collections of essays on Romanticism and Children's
Literature and author of numerous articles, mostly on British Romantic literature and
children's literature.
He and Deje have three children: Catherine, a physical therapist; Mark,
a web designer; and Jamie, a Ph. D. in Russian language and literature currently teaching at
Kenyon College. Jim and Deje travel often in the Carolinas, in Europe and Great Britain,
and of course in northwestern lower Michigan, where they return every summer to hike,
swim, and revel in the beauty of the Leelanau peninsula. Jim continues a lifelong passion for
choral singing as a choir member at Christ Episcopal Church, Charlotte, where he sings some
bass-baritone solos. In the Shadow of the Bear is his first non-academic publication.