News

• Joe will be a panelist at ThrillerFest 2026 in New York City! He’ll be speaking on Saturday morning on Fear, Fury, or Love: Emotion in Suspense. 
• Read Joe in Writer’s Digest: Write what you Don’t Know: Crossing Boundaries in Fiction. 
• Read Joe in CrimeReads on how his work as a psychologist has informed his writing. 
• On March 14, 2025 Joe published this op-ed in the Portland Press Herald addressing threats to special education.
• In December 2023, after 155 episodes, Joe and Kimberly hosted their last show and went on indefinite hiatus. Episodes of Authors Love Bookstores remain available on YouTube, and Joe’s love of and support for independent bookselling lives on! A Mighty Blaze is a literary collective founded in March 2020 by novelists Jenna Blum and Caroline Leavitt. In April of that year, as businesses of all kinds closed their doors, Joe and his friend and fellow writer Kimberly Hensle Lowrance launched Authors Love Bookstores through A Mighty Blaze’s platform to support independent booksellers. Over the next three and a half years, Joe and Kimberly “visited” bookstores in all 50 states across the US; Puerto Rico; Washington DC; Canada; and the UK. Featured authors included Judy Blume, Tom Perrotta, CJ Box, Mikel Jollett, Ann Patchett, Josh Ritter, and many more.
• Joe presented on trauma and literature at the 2021 Muse and the Marketplace conference. Drawing on his experience as a clinical psychologist, he discussed the nature of psychological trauma, the writing process, and the representation of trauma in Young Adult literature.