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. His first novel, Pike, was published in 2010 by PM Press. His latest project, Satan is Real: The Ballad of the Louvin Brothers, co-written with Charlie Louvin, was released by Igniter Books on January 3rd, 2012.
He lives with his wife and 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.
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