Joe Samuel Starnes is coauthor of Leth Oun's life story, A Refugee's American Dream: From the Killing Fields of Cambodia to the U.S. Secret Service, to be published in February 2023 by Temple University Press. Red Dirt: A Tennis Novel, published by Breakaway Books, his third novel, was released in April 2015 and was reviewed very favorably by the Philadelphia Inquirer. 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. Starnes 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. A critical essay discussing Starnes's three novels was featured in Twenty-First-Century Southern Writers: New Voices, New Perspectives published by the the University Press of Mississippi in March 2021.