James Monroe Johnson, born in the Mississippi Delta, started writing in the second grade of elementary school. His teachers encouraged him throughout his elementary and high school years, and surprisingly, he found professorial encouragement in college. During his years in the Army, and especially the two years he served in Vietnam, he wrote letters and poems for his buddies who sent them to their wives and girlfriends. James graduated from Okolona College, where he recorded his first poem, as he wrote songs for The Twilighters – a band in which he played guitar and bass. After nine years in the military, he enrolled at University of Miami, where he graduated in 1975.

In most cases, the place where the poem was written will say, most vividly to those that know me well exactly what I was doing. In other words, if the poem was written in Da Nang, South Vietnam, those that know me will readily know that I was in the Army, and that I was fighting the war as a soldier, and not as an administrator for some governmental agency, or some other private company.