Charles Alcorn has lived in and written about Texas all his life. A former all-state linebacker, Alcorn founded Splendid Seed Tobacco Company and was a sportswriter and packaged goods copywriter before receiving his PhD in English Literature and Creative Writing (Fiction) from the University of Houston. Alcorn is the author of the short-story collection Argument Against the Good-Looking Corpse (2011 Texas Review Press). He is currently at work on a second novel, Sharkskin Palace, set during the Austin Chalk Boom/Sexual Revolution of the 1970s behind the mysterious River Cane Curtain on the Coastal Bend of Texas.