Joe Samuel Starnes

Joe Samuel “Sam” Starnes was born in Alabama, grew up in Cedartown, Georgia, and has lived in either New Jersey or Philadelphia since 2000. Red Dirt: A Tennis Novel is his third novel. His first novel, Calling, was published in 2005, and was reissued in 2014 as an e-book by Mysterious Press.com/Open Road. NewSouth Books published his novel Fall Line in November 2011, and it was selected to The Atlanta Journal-Constitution’s “Best of the South” list. He has had journalism appear in The New York Times, The Washington Post, The Philadelphia Inquirer, and various magazines, as well as essays, short stories, and poems in literary journals. He holds a bachelor’s degree in journalism from the University of Georgia, an MA in English from Rutgers University in Newark, and an MFA in Creative Nonfiction from Goucher College. He was awarded a fellowship to the 2006 Sewanee Writers’ Conference. He works in the administration at Widener University and has taught writing courses at Widener, Rowan University, and Saint Joseph’s University.