Jim (James) Burnett

About

Jim Burnett began writing following a thirty-year career with the National Park Service, and his experiences at eight parks all across the county provided a wealth of material for three non-fiction books. He has authored over four hundred short articles as a contributor for National Parks Traveler.org. During his three decades in the parks, Jim encountered visitors from all over the world, and inevitably some of those trips to the parks didn't turn out quite as planned. After his retirement, Jim took the best of those examples of vacations gone awry and included them in his first book, Hey Ranger! True Tales of Humor and Misadventure from America's National Parks. A sequel, Hey Ranger 2: More True Tales of Humor and Misadventure from the Great Outdoors, followed two years later. Jim's goal with both books was to create family-friendly reading that would both entertain and inform, to help his readers avoid similar miscues on their own park visits. He has enjoyed sharing these stories during national and regional radio and TV appearances and in-person talks for a variety of audiences. Jim's newest book, Saltgrass Prairie Saga: A German American Family in Texas, was published by Texas A&M University Press in 2025, and won the 2026 Kate Brooks Award for Historical Research from the Texas State Historical Association. This non-fiction work is based on excerpts from a large collection of letters written by a family who came to Texas from Germany in 1845. That material, along with first-hand accounts from several diaries, local records, military reports, and other contemporary accounts, was woven into a historical narrative that covers life on the Texas coastal prairie from the frontier years to the Civil War and beyond. The book offers a new perspective on a pivotal period in the history of Texas, and Jim looks forward to sharing these stories as he continues to actively research follow-up articles from this book