About

Alexander Blevens is an award-winning historical fiction author. His latest novel, Arkansas Black, bridges Western and Southern genres and won the Spur Award from the Western Writers of America. He writes emotionally resonant stories of family bonds, hardship, moral choice, and character, all grounded in accurate historical settings.

An Air Force veteran, retired orthopaedic surgeon, and public speaker, he found his voice as a writer later in life. He has appeared on public radio, national author panels, at regional book festivals and book clubs, and at local library events.

Raised in California, he now makes his home on the Mississippi Gulf Coast, where he lives and writes with his wife, a Southern belle from New Orleans.

Be yourself; everyone else is already taken.
Oscar Wilde

Bycatch

In Alexander’s debut novel, Bycatch, Southern and Vietnamese cultures collide on the shrimp-rich waters off Biloxi when two Vietnam War veterans unexpectedly meet in America. Their families must confront old wounds through reconciliation and forgiveness to find peace with the past and present. The characters, setting, and plot were derived from personal experience amongst the veterans, fishermen, and their families on the Mississippi Gulf Coast.

Arkansas Black

The idea for his second novel, Arkansas Black, began with a faded early-twentieth-century family photograph taken in Bentonville, Arkansas, showing twin brothers and their sister-wives beside a fruit tree nursery. The image stirred the author’s curiosity about the era and the people who lived it. There was a story here.

To bring this distinctive period of American history to life, Alexander studied historical records, periodicals, accounts, land deeds, local museums, and period maps. Though the collapse of Northwest Arkansas’s Southern apple industry is rarely explored in history books or historical fiction, it offers rich material: prohibition, corrupt politicians, and natural disasters. This era of American history is often overshadowed by the later crises of the Great Depression and the Dust Bowl.