About James Spada

As a thirteen-year-old kid in Staten Island, James Spada started the first Marilyn Monroe Memorial Fan Club. He produced four bulletins and one yearbook a year for four years, when he had to disband the club due to lack of money.

In college he founded EMK: The Edward M. Kennedy Quarterly, and worked as an intern in Senator Kennedy’s Boston office in 1970.

At 23 his first book, Barbra: The First Decade (The Films and Career of Barbra Streisand), was published. He followed that up with the authorized book The Films of Robert Redford. He went on to write illustrated coffee-table books about Streisand, Marilyn Monroe, Judy Garland and Liza Minnelli, Katharine Hepburn, Bette Midler, Shirley MacLaine and Warren Beatty, and Jane Fonda.

In 1987 his first non-pictorial biography, Grace: The Secret Lives of a Princess, became a major international bestseller. He followed that up with intimate biographies of Peter Lawford, Bette Davis, Barbra Streisand, and Julia Roberts.

His writing has appeared in Vanity Fair, People, Ladies Home Journal, Cosmopolitan, The New York Times Book Review, McCall’s, the Los Angeles Times, the London Sunday Express, and many other publications.

In 2010 his first work of fiction, Days When My Heart was Volcanic—A Novel of Edgar Allan Poe, was published.

In recent years he has become equally renowned as a photographer of the male nude. His first collection, Black & White Men, was nominated for a Lambda Literary Award as the Best Visual Arts Book of 2000.

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From "Black & White Men" published in 2000:
Over the past several years, Jim has also become known for his evocative black-and-white studies of the male nude. He has had three one-man exhibitions, most recently in January 2000 at the prestigious Gallery One at the New England School of Photography in Boston. "I've been taking pictures since I was a teenager," Jim says, "but it took a back seat to my celebrity books. Now I d like to be known as a hyphenate, a writer-photographer. Photographing people is very much like writing about them, except that I'm creating the portrait with light rather than words. Light is as much a subject for me as the model."