Noah Ashley Blooms
Noah Ashley Blooms (they/them) is a queer, nonbinary, Appalachian author of Where I Can’t Follow and Every Bone a Prayer. Their work has been nominated for the Crook’s Corner Book Prize, Weatherford Award, and Judy Gaines Young Book Award, and they’ve been named a South Arts State Literary Fellow for Kentucky. Their writing has appeared in The Year’s Best Dark Fantasy & Horror, Fantasy & Science Fiction, Strange Horizons, The Oxford American, Reactor, and elsewhere. They received their MFA as a John and Renee Grisham Fellow at the University of Mississippi and are a graduate of the Clarion Writer’s Workshop.
Featured Book
These Dreaming Hills
These Dreaming Hills gathers science fiction, fantasy, and horror stories from writers across Central Appalachia. Edited by Noah Ashley Blooms, the anthology presents a chorus of voices reclaiming the right to imagine and reimagine Appalachia from within.
You’ll witness a father who returns from the dead with something deeply wrong, unearthly technology hidden in company towns, and oceans waiting behind mountains. You’ll move through haunted hollers and flooded towns, alien futures and mythic pasts, where faith falters, bodies transform, and the land itself remembers. You’ll be carried into tales both familiar and strange, where Appalachia is altered from within and the boundaries of reality are quietly, and sometimes violently, undone.
Meet Noah Ashley Blooms and get a copy of their book at the 2026 Kentucky Book Festival, Saturday, November 7, 2026, at Joseph-Beth Booksellers.