Joe Samuel “Sam” Starnes is the coauthor of Leth Oun's life story, A Refugee's American Dream: From the Killing Fields of Cambodia to the U.S. Secret Service, published in print in 2023 by Temple University Press and as audiobook by Tantor Media. The audiobook, narrated by Tim Lounibos, was honored as a finalist in the 2024 Audie Awards. 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 second novel Fall Line in November 2011, and it was selected to The Atlanta Journal-Constitution’s “Best of the South” list. Red Dirt: A Tennis Novel, published in 2015, is his third novel. 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.