BOWLING GREEN, Ky. — The Bluegrass state has produced some of the country’s best authors and poets with the likes of Hunter S. Thompson, bell hooks and C.E. Morgan. Now, you can add an English professor who calls Kentucky home to that list. His latest book made it on the New York Times Best Seller list.
David Bell, who grew up in Cincinnati, is a professor in the English Department at Western Kentucky University. Besides his work at the university, he has published 15 books. His latest “She’s Gone” is a New York Times Best Seller.
“The number one thing is I want people to enjoy the book and be entertained by it,” Bell said. Bell, who has lived in Bowling Green for 14 years, based his young adult novel in a fictional Kentucky town. “And after I’d been living here for a while, I realized that this is home, this is where I fell comfortable, so I started setting my books here in Kentucky,” Bell said.
This is Bell’s first young adult novel, and he didn’t intend to write one when he first started writing “She’s Gone”. But he realized the interesting points in the book were the flashbacks of the characters in high school, so began his new endeavour.
“And as soon as I started writing it, I really enjoyed writing it, and I felt like I was making a connection with the character’s voice, so I just kept going,” Bell said.
And his advice to his students and other aspiring writers: “You succeed when you don’t give up, you succeed when you keep trying. And I think they’re a lot of talented people who don’t make it as far because they may give up sooner,” Bell said.