Joe Samuel "Sam" Starnes was born in Alabama, grew up in Georgia, and has lived in New Jersey and Philadelphia since 2000. His first novel, Calling, was published in 2005. NewSouth Books published his second novel Fall Line in November 2011. He has had journalism appear in The New York Times, The Washington Post and various magazines, as well as essays, short stories, and poems in literary journals. A graduate of the University of Georgia and Rutgers University in Newark, he was awarded a fellowship to the 2006 Sewanee Writers' Conference. He is working on an MFA in creative nonfiction at Goucher College.
