Kelly Cheek has been closely following a creative muse for his entire life. He grew up in the big city of Sacramento, California and the small town of Parsons in southeast Kansas. As a devoted introvert, he never really fit in with most social circles, but was happiest when stuck away in his room with his creative pursuits – art, writing songs and playing them on his guitar, and writing stories.

Kelly was a natural. Born creative, many of the earliest photos of him, back before color was invented, show him with a pencil in his hand. He was drawing before he could read, but once he learned to read, he began writing.

He started writing actual short stories in his teens, and though he had naïve dreams of becoming a celebrated author, none of those stories were ever published. One, however, lasted for decades. Kelly wrote and rewrote it several times over the years as he learned more about writing. In time, though he enjoyed the process of writing it, he came to realize that the story was not really viable as a commercial novel. But he liked some of the characters and their accounts enough that he has since lifted them from their original story and placed them in other projects where they could live out their natural lives outside the confines of the perpetually unfinished original.

Now, having spent years honing his craft, he’s a lover of history, a writer of both novels and nonfiction, and enjoys writing stories set against real historical backgrounds. He is particularly fascinated with how the past interacts with and influences the present, and the scenes in his stories often alternate between past and present.

Kelly Cheek now lives in Denver, Colorado, where he can often be found hunched over his computer, pouring his lifeblood into his next opus.