James Y. Bartlett is an American journalist, writer, editor and author.

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For most of his career, Bartlett worked in magazine journalism, specializing in covering the worlds of travel, golf and upscale lifestyle.  He worked on staff as an editor with Golfweek, Caribbean Travel & Life and Luxury Golf magazines, among others.

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But he also published hundreds of freelance pieces in publications ranging from Bon Appetit to Esquire, Men’s Journal to Golf for Women.

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Bartlett was the golf columnist for Forbes FYI magazine for the first fifteen years of that publication’s history and wrote a similar column on the golf lifestyle for Hemispheres, the in-flight publication of United Airlines for nearly 20 years, the latter under the pseudonym of “A.G. Pollard Jr.”

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He began writing his popular Hacker Golf Mystery series in 1991 with the publication of Death is a Two-Stroke Penalty (St. Martin’s Press). That series, now published by Yeoman House, contains seven novels.

 

Bartlett began his Swamp Yankee Mystery series in 2022, and wrote and published the first three titles as well as the novella-prequel Rum Row in the first year, The fourth Swamp Yankee Mystery, Family Affairs, is due for publication in March 2023. 

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He calls his epic historical novel Year of the Sheep his 'great American novel, which happens to be set in Scotland.'  That book, published in 2000, was a quarterfinalist in the 2021 BookLife Fiction of the Year contest sponsored by the BookLife division of Publisher's Weekly magazine.

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Bartlett is also the author of five nonfiction books.

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