WB Henley has been a geologist for 45 years. He’s read a lot of rocks in his time. Believe it or not, rocks are the books written by Nature using Earth as her paper, Wind and Water as her writing tools, and Fire as the emotion at the heart of every good story. Not so different than us mere mortals.
WB has been a Southerner for even a couple of decades longer. Not that the South holds a lock on good writers. It’s just that there are so many conflicts, contradictions, and customs in the South that a good story is pretty much around every turn in a dirt road or smokestack in the skyline. Two of his stories were published in the 2019 Awarded Writers’ Collection published by the Alabama Writers’ Cooperative (AWC) including Vigil, a flash fiction piece about family dynamics in a hospital waiting room, and Ashes, a story about lost ashes and dashed dreams at a funeral home. He made the shortlist in the 2019 Faulkner-Windom Writing Competition with On the Shores of a Pleistocene Sea, a tale of lost chances and second chances in a distant land.
Inescapable won the 2022 prize for Best First Chapter of a novel awarded in the AWC writers’ competition.
WB makes his home in Indian Springs Village, Alabama, with his wife Shelia. Over the years there, he has raised two sons and enjoyed seven grandchildren. Along the way, together, they have cared for three horses, numerous dogs, an occasional cat, and even a wayward bird or two.