About the Author

Wes Blake is the award-winning author of PINEVILLE TRACE, a Southern Gothic flash novella (Etchings Press, 2024). His narrative nonfiction collection HAZELGREEN AND OTHER HAUNTS, a memoir of place-in-essays, is forthcoming in 2027 from West Virginia University Press. His debut book PINEVILLE TRACE was featured on Deep South Magazine’s Reading List, winner of the Etchings Press Novella Prize, Publishers Weekly BookLife Editor’s Pick, finalist for the Eric Hoffer Book Award, Next Generation Indie Book Award, National Indie Excellence Award, Feathered Quill Book Award, and distinguished favorite for the Independent Press Award. Pulitzer Prize finalist author Lee Martin called him a “writer to watch," and Porchlight Southern Literature Journal named him one of “12 Southern Writers to Read Alongside the Canon.”

His novel manuscript ANTENNA was a semifinalist for the University of New Orleans Press Book Prize and Sundress Publications Prose Open Reading Period. It won Eastern Kentucky University’s Outstanding Graduate Project Award. His fiction, essays, reviews, and interviews have appeared in Electric Literature, Appalachian Journal, Southern Review of Books, Los Angeles Review, storySouth, Untelling, JMWW, Louisiana Literature Journal, Blood & Bourbon, Book of Matches, Jelly Bucket, and White Wall Review, among others, and he holds an MFA from Bluegrass Writers Studio. He studied writing under Gurney Norman, James Baker Hall, Julie Hensley, R. Dean Johnson—and very briefly under Denis Johnson. He has written obituaries, worked in a Cajun restaurant, sold advertising, and taught writing to high school and college students. He lives in Nonesuch, Kentucky, with his wife and cats, where they’ve planted 100 trees.