Join us in the shop as Jim Zervanos returns with his new memoir, Your Story Starts Here: A Year on the Brink with Generation Z.
About the Book
Jim Zervanos, a seasoned high-school English teacher and father of two, embarks on a mission at the cusp of a new school year. He realizes that today's youth are thrust into a tumultuous world and burdened with saving it. To chronicle this extraordinary period in America, he assigns himself a unique task: keeping a journal.
Within its pages, we witness “his kids” grappling with pressing issues like identity politics, gun violence, and political uncertainty. A sophomore prodigy wrestles his demons onto the pages of his fiction before entering a psychiatric hospital. An estranged junior posts ominous threats on Snapchat, while a principal sabotages a student walkout. Meanwhile, in his classroom, Jim prepares a hiding space for an active shooter event and, back home, finds solace in the eulogy of his young sons’ pet fish, sent on its final journey with a flush.
By year's end, Jim, unwavering in his determination to inspire hope in his students, discovers that it's the youth who inspire hope in him. Their creativity and ideals paint a vivid portrait of an evolving America, seen through the kaleidoscope of Generation Z. Your Story Starts Here: A Year on the Brink with Generation Z is an intimate exploration of the challenges, resilience, and unwavering hope of today's youth in a turbulent world.
About the Author
Jim Zervanos is a teacher, artist, and author of two memoirs, That Time I Got Cancer: A Love Story and Your Story Starts Here (spring 2024), and the novel LOVE Park. Essays from Your Story Starts Here have been published and named finalists in several national contests. “Changing Your Mind” received an Honorable Mention in the 2020 Tom Howard/John H. Reid Fiction & Essay Contest and is published at WinningWriters.com. Contest judge Dennis Norris II called this essay “a stunning reflection from a man who fears he’s failed his student, this piece will have you standing and cheering, and hoping for both teacher and student.” Another essay, “Millennial Girl,” appears in the May 2020 issue of English Journal . Others have been selected as finalists in the Fourth Genre Michael Steinberg Memorial Essay Contest and December Magazine’s 2020 Curt Johnson Prose Award in Nonfiction.
His fiction has appeared in numerous publications, including Chicago Quarterly Review, Cimarron Review, Cream City Review, Hawaii Review, and Green Mountains Review, and the anthologies Philly Fiction and Philadelphia Noir. His stories have also won the Folio annual fiction prize and been named runner-up for the Marguerite McGlinn National Short Story Prize. Contest judge and author Steve Almond called Communion “A brilliant, wrenching account of the secrets families keep.”
His short-story collection Your Brother, Who Loves You was a finalist for the Hawk Mountain Book Award. His novel American Gyro was a finalist in the University of New Orleans Press Publishing Lab Prize, the Failbetter.com novella contest, and the William Faulkner – William Wisdom Creative Writing Competition. Two chapters from American Gyro have been published – in Hawaii Review and Failbetter.com.
He earned his MFA from Warren Wilson College and his BA and MA from Bucknell University, where he won the William Bucknell Prize for English and was named Academic All-American and Patriot League Scholar Athlete of the Year in baseball. He teaches at Penncrest High School in the suburbs of Philadelphia, where he lives with his wife and two sons.