About
Barbara Gregorich, who writes fiction and nonfiction for adults and for children, has in her writing career deliberately moved from one genre to another, writing about the things important in life — baseball, mystery, and social justice. Her seminal Women at Play: The Story of Women in Baseball (Harcourt, 1993) won the SABR-MacMillan Award and laid the groundwork for other books on the subject. For Women at Play as well as her other research and writings on women in baseball, Barbara Gregorich received the 2024 SABR Dorothy Seymour Mills Lifetime Achievement Award.
Gregorich earned her BA from Kent State University, her MA from the University of Wisconsin, and she attended Harvard University for post-graduate work in American Studies. During this time she was active in the political struggles of the Sixties, including the antiwar movement, the civil rights movement, and the women’s liberation movement. Those struggles and experiences influence her writing today.
Gregorich’s first book was fiction, the highly-acclaimed She’s on First (Contemporary, 1987), about a woman shortstop in the major leagues. While writing baseball novels and nonfiction, she also worked as an educational writer, creating more than 100 activity books for various publishers; writing a series of Start to Read books for School Zone Publishing; writing early readers (Waltur Buys a Pig in a Poke and Waltur Paints Himself into a Corner) for Houghton; and writing BrainQuest cards and workbooks for Workman Publishing.
Many a child learned how to read with one or more of Gregorich’s Start to Read books, among them The Fox on the Box, Sue Likes Blue, The Gum on the Drum, and Jog, Frog, Jog. Twenty years after she wrote these books she began receiving fan mail from the kids who had read them, loved them, and were now using the books to teach their own children how to read. Gregorich often jokes that she learned a lot about character, conflict, and plot while creating these 100-word stories. Starting in 2010 Gregorich began to explore self-publishing. Her free verse nonfiction baseball book, Jack and Larry tells the story of Cleveland outfielder Jack Graney and his bull terrier, Larry. After she compiled three collections of her research notes (Research Notes for Women at Play, Volumes 1, 2, and 3) she spent a year organizing thousands of pages of original research and donated these much-requested materials to the National Baseball Hall of Fame.
A frequent presenter at Illinois libraries, Gregorich was appointed a 2013 Roads Scholar by the Illinois Arts Council. In 2021 City of Light published The F Words, whose story of ICE persecution of immigrants focuses on the resilience of working class teens. Exit Velocity features a young working class woman who encounters discrimination in the workplace and assault on the streets. As she fights for her rights, she is aided by a parrot on a mission from another planet.
Featured Work
Exit Velocity
Rowan Pickett’s world has gone to hell, her sister murdered in a high school shooting, her mother leaving, and Rowan sitting home and mourning. But then reality kicks in: Rowan realizes that she wants to survive, and in order to survive she needs a job. This leads her to Titus Longshaw, Black leader of the socialist organization Working Class Control. Titus points Rowan to a job at Package Nova, a global shipping firm on Chicago’s south side.
From there things move at the pace of a million packages whizzing by on conveyer belts. The foreman has it in for Rowan because she speaks out against sexism. Worse yet, Zeb Snoddy, proclaimed white-supremacist, also has it in for Rowan because of her politics. One dark night Snoddy confronts Rowan and her best friend, Keisha Longshaw.
Jake Terranova, a podcaster from Boston, starts out thinking that Rowan has a parrot she has trained to assault (and maybe assassinate?) Zeb Snoddy. And then he suspects the unthinkable — that the parrot Deeply is from another planet.
The paths of Rowan, Keisha, Titus, Jake, and Deeply intersect where and when it matters most: as Rowan and Working Class Control lead demonstrations in front of the Package Nova headquarters.
Like the striking workers of the UAW and UPS, the union organizers at Amazon and Starbucks, Exit Velocity inspires the working class to embrace the possibility of social change.
Other Works
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The F Words
2021
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Cookie the Cockatoo: Everything Changes
2020
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Charlie Chan's Poppa: Earl Derr Biggers
2018
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Research Notes for Women at Play, Volume 3
2015
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Guide to Writing the Mystery Novel: Lots of Examples, Plus Dead Bodies
2014
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Crossing the Skyway: Poems
2013
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Research Notes for Women at Play, Volume 2
2013
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Jack and Larry: Jack Graney and Larry, the Cleveland Baseball Dog
2012
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Sound Proof
2011
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Research Notes for Women at Play, Volume 1
2010
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Waltur Paints Himself into a Corner and Other Stories
2007
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Waltur Buys a Pig in a Poke and Other Stories
2006
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Women at Play: The Story of Women in Baseball
1993
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Dirty Proof
1988
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She's on First
1987
Awards and Recognition
- SABR Macmillan Award for Best Baseball Research, 1993