James Richardson is a former senior writer with The Sacramento Bee, who covered the California State Capitol and California politics. He was previously a reporter with The Riverside Press-Enterprise with assignments including extensive coverage of the resurgent Ku Klux Klan in Southern California in the 1980s.

As a journalist, he wrote "Willie Brown: A Biography," (506 pages) published in 1996 by The University of California Press, about the former Speaker of the California Assembly and later San Francisco mayor. His book is considered the definitive account of the life and times of Brown. The book was based on research he did as an Alicia Patterson Foundation fellow.

His most recent book, "The Abolitionist's Journal: Memories of an American Antislavery Family," (294 pages) published by the University of New Mexico Press/High Road Books in 2022, is about his nineteenth century anti-slavery Methodist ancestors and how their story has shaped him. Drawing on an extensive family archive of journals and letters, he and his wife, Lori, who is also a retired journalist retraced his ancestors steps through nine states.

Richardson left daily journalism in the mid-1990s to enter the Church Divinity School of the Pacific in Berkeley, and was ordained an Episcopal priest in 2001. He has served churches in the Bay Area and Charlottesville, Virginia, and recently retired as the Interim Dean of Trinity Episcopal Cathedral in mid-town Sacramento.

He continues to write occasionally for various publications including the Washington Post and CalMatters. He is an alum of the Community of Writers (formerly called the Squaw Valley Community of Writers).