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My publisher is ecstatic – we picked up A.J. Hartley for a short series his Big Press didn’t want to keep the rights to because it couldn’t sell the 100,000 copies they need to make money. Mr. Hartness became friends with the NY-times best-selling author on the convention circuit (remember writers, networking is a thing) and when Dr. Hartley mention a pet project of his that was available, John threw himself on that grenade to keep the Shakespearean professor from trunking his Will Hawthorne stories.
For his day job, A.J. Hartley is the Robinson Distinguished Professor of Shakespeare at UNC Charlotte. Which means he doesn’t just like literature, he breathes it. Working with David Hewson, he recreated prose versions Macbeth and Hamlet.
Well and truly bitten by the writing bug, he puts pen to paper for a variety of genres: thriller, fantasy, the previous mentioned historical fiction, and even some middle grade and young adult. He goes as far as to write additional works under a pseudonym of Andrew Hart. But nearly everything he does, including his literary non-fiction professor publications, are doen under A.J. Hartley.
His Steeplejack series is the “new thing” and worth a read, as is nearly everything this master of the English language produces.