Meet Jerry Harju

Jerry Harju is a humor writer and book publisher who lives in Marquette, Michigan. He received a degree in engineering mechanics from the University of Michigan in 1957 and completed his formal education with a MS from the University of Southern California in 1985. After thirty years as a manager in the aerospace industry in Southern California, Jerry began writing as a second career. He has written eight books and writes a column for the Marquette newspaper.

Northern Reflections, Northern D'Lights, Northern Passages, and Northern Memories are collections of humorous autobiographical short stories about growing up in the Upper Peninsula in the 1940's.

The Class of '57 takes readers along a humorous and nostalgic path during Harju's six years of "higher education" at the University of Michigan. University life then with its 1950's attitudes on world affairs, morality, and women's roles in society was much different from today.

Cold Cash is Jerry's first novel, a wacky tale about two unschooled amateurs who decide to solve their cash-flow problems by pulling a bank heist and getting away on snowmobiles. Typical of Harju's work, the robbery doesn't go as planned and is further complicated by two strong-willed women. The book won a Midwest Independent Publishers Association Book Achievement Award in 1999, and is currently being marketed as a screenplay in Los Angeles.

Here's what I think..., Way Back When, and his latest, Our World was in Black & White, are collections of Jerry's columns that have appeared for the past several years in the Marquette newspaper, The Mining Journal.

In addition to writing books and newspaper columns and running a publishing company, Jerry travels all over the globe, including having made three attempts at the North Pole in the 1990's.

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