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Wes Blake

Home Featured Authors & Panelists Featured Participant Lineup 2026 Wes Blake

Wes Blake is the award-winning author of Pineville Trace and the forthcoming Hazelgreen and Other Haunts. Pulitzer Prize finalist author Lee Martin called him a “writer to watch.” His fiction and essays have appeared in Electric Literature, storySouth, and Louisiana Literature Journal, among others. He holds an MFA from the Bluegrass Writers Studio and lives in Nonesuch, Kentucky, with his wife and cats, where they’ve planted 100 trees.

 

Schedule

Will be posted when available.

Pineville Trace

Winner of the Etchings Press Novella Prize | Featured on Deep South Magazine's Reading List | Publishers Weekly BookLife Editor's Pick | National Indie Excellence Award Finalist | Eric Hoffer Book Award Finalist | Next Generation Indie Book Award Finalist | Independent Press Award Distinguished Favorite | Feathered Quill Book Award Finalist

"Pineville Trace serves as the incisive, elegiac odyssey of a confidence man who has lost his sense of spiritual direction." — Publishers Weekly

"A man escapes from prison only to find he can't separate himself from his past. Wes Blake renders the tale with great empathy and in language that's so lyrical it practically lifts from the page."— Lee Martin, author of Pulitzer Prize Finalist The Bright Forever

"An absolutely compelling read. Blake's prose is sparse and simple, whose short, almost broken, sentences sing with enormous power." —SmokeLong Quarterly

"Blake's writing provides a contemporary case-study on artful, effective minimalism. The effect is an introspective, haunting tale that remains with us." —Heavy Feather Review

Wes Blake tells a parallel story in Pineville Trace. Like a photo and its negative, the narrative follows similar characters and situations as Frank, a former faith healer and revival preacher, is rewriting over his past to make sense of it. Following the Buffalo—or, at least, a cat named Buffallo—Frank Russet mulls over his past in a layered narrative that would lead you deeper into the wilderness with no way out. Wes Blake's debut novella plays with time, begging the reader to follow along and trust the ride. Frank is a protagonist filled with guilt, searching for meaning in the forest with his cat, Buffalo. For readers who like nature, escape, and cats.