James L. Nelson

James L. Nelson (born 1962) is an American historical nautical novelist.

Early life

Nelson was born in Lewiston, Maine in 1962. He expressed an interest in boats from a young age, building a skipjack in ninth grade and a canoe in eleventh. In 1980, Nelson graduated from Lewiston High School. He attended the University of Massachusetts Amherst, Amherst, Massachusetts for two years, and then transferred to UCLA, with the ambition of becoming a film director. After living in Marina del Rey, Los Angeles, Nelson found work aboard the Golden Hinde, where he met his future wife Lisa Page. In 1992, Nelson completed his first novel, By Force of Arms. He and Lisa were married the next year. Nelson currently lives in Harpswell, Maine, with Lisa and their four children, Elizabeth, Nathaniel, Jonathan, and Abigail. Nelson continues to write full-time, and has published over twenty-five books, both fiction and nonfiction.

Awards Nelson received the W.Y. Boyd Literary Award for Excellence in Military Fiction from the American Library Association in 2004 for his novel, Glory In The Name: A Novel of the Confederate Navy.

He won the 2009 Samuel Eliot Morison Award for Naval Literature for George Washington's Secret Navy.