"We will never truly know the intensity of someone's greatest joys or deepest heartaches—nor the intimate things that live and die between their heartbeats… for the simple fact, that only their heart beats in their chest and not ours."

James Randall Chumbley

Born in Fayette, Alabama, James Randall Chumbley is the middle child of three children—raised in Columbus and Warner Robins, Georgia. Despite an extremely difficult childhood, Chumbley persevered and eventually graduated from Mercer University in Macon, Georgia. The author studied art and psychology—while slowing discovering there was so much more to life than in Middle Georgia. At Mercer, James began exploring his creativity while struggling to look after the well-being of his mother who was destroyed by his monsterous fatherlove of beauty and the difficulties and struggles often associated with achieving it.

After college and a year of postgraduate studies, the artist wanted to live in California but moved to Atlanta, Georgia—the biggest city closest to home—to look after the well-being of his mother who sufferd from mental illness. Wasting little time, he began juggling two lives while making a name for himself in the city’s eclectic, yet welcoming, art world.

It was at this time, he began to explore another outlet for his creativity. It started with journals written in high school and college—including dark poetry—about his difficult past experiences of an abusive and violent childhood he thought he would never survive much less lived to eighteen-years-of-age in fear his father would kill him along with his mother, sister, and older brother. Short stories collectively telling a bigger story about life in general, eventually becoming an obsession to document his multi-faceted life including that abuse and violence of his childhood using a new medium—the written word in his first book, “In the Arms of Adam: a diary of men.” It was later followed by two more books, “Before the Last Dance” and “Alabama Snow.”

"I hope I’ve helped people through my writing as well as my art. I find writing is very much like painting with words. Art has always been an escape for me even as a young child. I would hide away in a closet or a corner with paper and crayons drawing places to run away from the yelling and screaming that echoed off the walls of our house that was never a home as well as from my father’s brutality."

For many years, after moving to Atlanta, Chumbley has been involved as an activist and remains effective within several AIDS, Youth, Homeless, Equal Rights, and Mental Health Service Organizations—donating his time and art which encompasses abstracts, using the media of photography, oil, wax, and varnish. His work has been in several galleries and is in many impressive private and corporate collections across the country and abroad.

After thirty-two years in Atlanta, in July 2013, the artist and writer finally fulfilled his teenage dream of moving to California. Chumbley now resides in the small community of Desert Hot Springs above the Palm Springs area. James Randall Chumbley remains dedicated to his art and writing, and continues to be generous with his artworks, donating it to many worthwhile charitable organizations when asked. Chumbley states, “Donating my work to help others gives my life a true purpose.” He tries to live by three rules: Love more than you’re loved, give more than you take, and leave it better than you found it. "All that is good inside of me, comes from my mother," states the artist and writer.

The artist and writer is presently completing his fourth book project while he continues to find a sense of home in his art.