Poe Ballantine

Poe Ballantine (born 1955 in Denver, Colorado) is the pen name of Edwin Hughes, a fiction and nonfiction writer known for his novels and especially his essays, many of which appear in The Sun. His second novel, Decline of the Lawrence Welk Empire, won Foreword Magazine’s Book of the Year. The odd jobs, eccentric characters, boarding houses, buses, and beer that populate Ballantine’s work often draw comparisons to the life and work of Charles Bukowski and Jack Kerouac.

One of Ballantine’s short stories, "The Blue Devils of Blue River Avenue", was included in Best American Short Stories 1998; one of his essays, "501 Minutes to Christ", appeared in Best American Essays 2006. His essay "Free Rent at the Totalitarian Hotel" (originally published in The Sun) opened Best American Essays 2013. Ballantine's essays and short stories have also appeared in the Coal City Review, Kenyon Review, and Atlantic Monthly. He has guest blogged for PowellsBooks.Blog and Marion Roach Smith's "Writing Lessons."

In 2013 Hawthorne Books & Literary Arts published Ballantine's memoir, Love & Terror on the Howling Plains of Nowhere with an introduction by Cheryl Strayed. Praised by Bruce Jacobs in Shelf Awareness as a "funny memoir and 'true crime' mashup by one of the country's best vagabond raconteurs" and by Cheryl Strayed as "his best book ever", the memoir follows Ballantine's interest in the disappearance of a professor from the town of Chadron, Nebraska. Love & Terror and the true crime circumstances that surround its creation are also the subject of a documentary of the same name by filmmaker Dave Jannetta.

Poe Ballantine lives in Chadron, Nebraska with his wife Cristina and their son Thomas Francisco.