Coal Creek

Joe Horton is a Virginia writer, real estate development executive, endurance athlete, and lifelong outdoorsman whose fiction is shaped by the places and experiences he knows best: farms, mountain trails, small towns, and the complicated relationship between land, unrelenting progress, and the people who call these places home.

His connection to Appalachia is personal. His mother's side of the family is from a holler outside Charleston, WV, and many of the voices, stories, personalities, and small details that have found their way into Coal Creek grew from the memories of family and trips into the mountains. 

Joe has spent more than three decades working in real estate and civil construction. That experience has given him a front row seat of how land changes, who makes those decisions, and what can be lost along the way...on both sides of the table. Away from work, he is a dad to two great kids, an ultrarunner, weightlifter, farmer, and frequent traveler through the Appalachians with his wife and best friend, Andrea, and their Vizsla, Juniper. 

Coal Creek is his debut novel. It is an Appalachian thriller about land, legacy, family, power, and what happens when outside interests decide a community is worth more than the people and history there. 

Joe lives on a farm in Virginia's Piedmont, where he writes, runs, works the land, and keeps finding new stories in places between progress and preservation.