I was raised in the small town of King, North Carolina. Growing up, our house was full of books, and my parents had floor-to-ceiling shelves full of just about anything you could want to read. My love for reading and stories came early, but what I loved most as a child was wandering through the rolling pastures and forests surrounding our house. I would walk out in the morning and wander along creeks and build forts and track animals, all the while dreaming up stories. The landscape of my home, perhaps more than anything, came to shape my imagination and taught me how to listen, how to fall in love with beauty, how to be silent and pay attention.
My grandmother was an accomplished poet and taught me how to read. She would take me to the library several times a week to pick out books. I would go with her to her poetry readings, just a little guy maybe four or five years old, and would listen to the beautiful sound of language as the poets read. Whether or not I understood the words, the rhythms coursed through me and still echo to this day.
I began playing the drums at ten years old and, being homeschooled, I would often finish my work as quickly as possible in order to practice the rest of the day. I excelled quickly, and soon I was playing in bands, was accepted to be the percussionist in the local youth symphony, and even became a session drummer for a few private studios. I have a deep love of jazz music, which has also blended into my fiction and poetry. The tones, rhythms, and structure all come together in fantastic ways, because language is music, and I’ve always been interested in following its melodies.
In high school, songwriting gave way to writing poetry and short stories. I began filling notebooks with scenes and stanzas. But when I began community college at seventeen, I took my first creative writing course, and found myself helplessly hooked to writing. I read voraciously, perhaps making up for the time I’d lost while wandering in the woods or playing music in smoky bars. I read widely and unprogrammatically, one writer leading me to another, one subject to the next.
My first real publication came when I was twenty-three, and Prime Number Magazine accepted a short story. Slowly, I wrote more and more; I sent out more stories and poems, gathered rejection slips, all the while falling deeper in love with stories and language.
My first novel, Move Over Mountain, was published in 2019 by J.New Books, a small press, but one who showed such care and love for the books they chose to take on. I still love every word of that story, and can remember nearly every moment of putting it on the page. My second novel, Hold Fast, was published in 2022 by Wiseblood Books. It went on to be a finalist for the 2023 CMA National Book Awards. That same year, Ghost City Press published a chapbook of my poems, Cicada Rex. My debut collection of stories, Into My Heart an Air that Kills, will be published by Loblolly Press in 2026.
Over the years I’ve been blessed enough to have stories and poems published in numerous journals and magazines and have been nominated for Pushcart Prizes, Best of the Net Awards, and translated into several languages. I am the recipient of the Penelope Niven Award, the Flying South Fiction Prize, and a finalist for the Doris Betts Fiction Prize and the Robert Watson Prize.
My wife and I have three boys, and in the past six years, nearly every word I’ve written, one of my sons has been sitting on my lap or asleep in my arms. My wife and boys keep me grounded. They are often my light in those moments of uncertainty and doubt, and they have saved me from many catastrophes.
In writing Recommendations for a Departing Soul (Regal House, 2027), my wife and sons became an even greater source of inspiration—not for the story or characters themselves, but for the grace and perseverance to keep going. Past all of the false starts and blocks, past all the days of self-doubt and those others of grand hubris—they quietly reminded me to just keep going.
Recommendations for a Departing Soul is a dark Southern Gothic tale of two brothers who live isolated in the rural foothills of North Carolina. Raised under the severe and dark guidance of their mother, the brothers have lived their life apart from the world and are certain the apocalypse has come. When their mother dies, they are left to bury her with help from their estranged and violent uncle, and together, they make a pilgrimage across the hills to their family home to lay her to rest.
The seed of the story came in the winter of 2022, when I had this image of a sickly, ghostly woman throwing stones at her sons who were hiding on the roof of their house. Just that, and nothing more. I saw them vividly and wanted to know the story, but they were stubborn and wouldn’t tell me. I tried to force it out of them, writing three full drafts of the novel and throwing each one away. They taught me patience, however, and they taught me how to wait and listen and watch. Slowly, they began to speak and think and move, and I followed them on their journey.
I write every first draft by hand, getting the whole story out in full before typing it onto the page on a 1930s Hermes Featherweight typewriter my wife bought me just before we were married. I’ve come to love the tactile and intimate nature of writing long-hand, of letting the imagination run and trying to capture where it goes. I love the music language makes, but even more, how a story or poem can put a hook in your heart and remind you how beautiful it is to be alive.
Regal House is proud to bring you Recommendations for a Departing Soul in 2027.
