James Beverly

James Beverly was born in Seco, a small historical coal mining town in eastern Kentucky. He is an only child. His family moved from Kentucky to Detroit when he was five years old. He grew up in Detroit, graduating from Cass Technical High School and receiving his Bachelor of Science degree from Wayne State University, he received a Master of Arts degree in Clinical Child Psychology from the University of Waterloo in Waterloo Ontario, Canada. Mr. Beverly was then invited by Dr. John Basmajian, the Dean of the Medical School at Queen’s University, to join his research team, which he spent the next two years enrolled in the Medical School at Queen’s University in Kingston Ontario where he was involved in research projects involving physically handicapped children.

Since then Mr. Beverly has worked in the field of mental health as a therapist and administrator in nine states for over thirty five years and has presented at a number of national and state conferences. He has been nominated for a variety of state and regional awards for innovative clinical programming and was among the first to develop and implement a multi-disciplinary battered women’s facility that was operated by a community mental health center. His innovative domestic intervention police training program that was designed to serve community based law enforcement agencies was presented by request to the Los Angeles Police Department.

Mr. Beverly retired in June of 2010.

During his many years of service, Mr. Beverly worked directly with a wide variety of distressed children and their families in a variety of institutional and community settings. During this time, he became acutely aware of the poor communication that existed in many of the families, which led to a lack of meaningful family values being instilled in the children. Most of these families were motivated to teach their children— but lacked the necessary basic materials, knowledge and skills to be successful. It was apparent to him that there were very little written or easily accessible materials available for parents and children to assist in these tasks. These experiences laid the foundation for a series of books for children and their parents that was designed specifically to fill these values and communication gaps in a pleasant, fun, and non-threatening manner.

Following the success of his nationally award-winning books, The Adventures of Seamus the Sheltie, and More Tales of Seamus the Sheltie, Mr. Beverly received many requests from parents asking if he would please write additional stories for them that would deal with some specific and difficult topics that they were having problems with trying to discuss them with their child. These requests led him to the publication of his current award-winning book, Seamus the Sheltie to the Rescue.

Please visit http://www.seamusthesheltie.com for more details.