Benjamin Whitmer

Teaches at Lighthouse Writers Workshop

Benjamin Whitmer was born and raised on back-to-the-land communes and counterculture enclaves ranging from Southern Ohio to Upstate New York. One of his earliest and happiest memories is of standing by the side of a country road with his mother, hitchhiking to parts unknown. Since then, he’s been a factory grunt, a vacuum salesman, a convalescent, a high-school dropout, a graduate student, a semi-truck loader, an activist, a kitchen-table gunsmith, a squatter, a college professor, a dishwasher, a technical writer and a petty thief. He lives with his two children in Colorado, where he spends most of his free time trolling local histories and haunting the bookshops, tobacconists and firing ranges of ungentrified Denver.

His first novel, Pike, was published in the US in 2010 by PM Press, and in France in 2012 by Éditions Gallmeister. Satan is Real: The Ballad of the Louvin Brothers, a memoir co-written with Charlie Louvin, was released by Igniter Books in 2012. His latest novel, Cry Father, was published to great critical acclaim.