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.

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.