Henley released his debut novel Inescapable in 2023 which won Best Southern Gothic Novel of the Year at the Killer Nashville International Writers’ Conference. Two of his stories were featured in the 2019 Awarded Writers’ Collection published by the Alabama Writers’ Cooperative including Vigil, a flash fiction piece about family dynamics in a hospital waiting room, and Ashes, a story about a lost urn and dashed dreams at a funeral home. He made the short list in the 2019 Faulkner-Wisdom Writing Competition with On the Shores of a Pleistocene Sea, a tale of second chances in a distant land. He is currently completing a Young Adult/Middle Grades fantasy tentatively titled Keeper of the Flame about a girl searching for her family in a prehistoric land and working on a non-fiction exploration of choices after trauma called Trigger Warning: Free Will After the Moment.

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 books written by Nature using Earth as her paper, Wind and Water as her writing tools, and Fire as the force at the heart of every good story. Not so different than for us mere mortals.

Henley has been a Southerner for even a couple of decades more. 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.

WB makes his home in Indian Springs Village, Alabama, with his wife Shelia. Over the years there, they have raised two sons and enjoyed seven grandchildren. Along the way, they have cared for three horses, numerous dogs, an occasional cat, and even a wayward bird or two.