About

            

  

  

    

Sheldon Lee Compton is a novelist, journalist, and filmmaker from Pike County, Pikeville, Eastern Kentucky.

NOVELIST

Compton graduated with a bachelor's of Arts Degree in English from the Univerity of Pikeville and with a Master's of Fine Arts Degree in Writing from the Sena Jeter Naslund-Karen Mann Graduate School of Writing at the University of Louisville.

He began his publishing career as the author of the short story collections The Same Terrible Storm (Foxhead Books, 2012), Where Alligators Sleep (Foxhead Books, 2014), Absolute Invention (Secret History Books, 2019) and Sway (Cowboy Jamboree Press, 2020).

Compton is also the author of the novels Brown Bottle (Bottom Dog Press, 2016), Dysphoria (Cowboy Jamboree Press, 2019), and Alice (Cowboy Jamboree Press, 2023).

His poetry chapbook Podunk Lore was part of the Lantern Lit series (Dog On a Chain Press, 2018) and his first full-length poetry collection, Runaways, was published in 2021 by Alien Buddha Press.

Compton's novel, Alice, was named one of the Best Books of 2023 as selected by the Independent Fiction Alliance.

In 2021 Cowboy Jamboree Press published The Collected Stories of Sheldon Lee Compton and followed that in 2022, on the anniversary of author Breece D'J Pancake's tragic death on April 8, 1979, Compton's memoir The Orchard Is Full of Sound, which the publisher describes as a book that "reflects on his [Compton's] own life, his struggles with poverty and divorce and violence and addiction and fatherhood and an early heart attack and trying to make it as a writer in rural Kentucky, all the while trying to trace the life and tragic ending of one of his literary heroes, Breece D'J Pancake."

In 2012, Compton was a finalist for both the Gertrude Stein Fiction Award and the Still Fiction Award. His writing has been nominated for the Chaffin Award for Excellence in Appalachian Writing, the Pushcart Prize, and longlisted for Wigleaf's Top 50.  He was cited twice for Best Small Fictions, in 2015 and 2016, before having his short story "Aversion" included in Best Small Fictions 2019 and his short story "The Good Life" included in Best Small Fictions 2022.

JOURNALIST

Beginning at age 14, Compton started working on a newspaper called The Floyd County Times as a part-time sportswriter. He did this until he turned 22 and then was hired on full-time as a news reporter. From there, he went to several newspapers beginning with The Hazard Herald in Perry County as that paper's managing editor. The next three newspapers Compton worked at over the next seven years, he was the editor at each one. In 2012, I went he shifted to teaching college. Now, with a total of 18 years as a journalist, he is again working in the field as a news reporter for a television station working with script writing, video editing, and creating content. Compton's recent reporting with Mountain Top News can be found here.

FILMMAKER

In the Fall of 2024, Compton entered into the Master's of Arts Degree in New Media Journalism program at Full Sail University. Nearly a quarter through that program, he will be filming a documentary about the evolution of the drug epidemic in Eastern Kentucky, once called the pain killer capital of the world by The Lexington Herald-Leader. Principal filming on hat documentary is tentatively scheduled to be completed by September of 2025. The first segment of that upcoming documentary can be found at Comptons investigative website, Scrutiny.

PUBLISHED WORKS

A list of links to his selected works (short stories, essays, poetry, etc.) can be found here.

Compton's following books can be purchased at Amazon or directly from the publisher. Here is a link to his current books.

His next novel, Oblivion Angels, is due to be released on January 1, 2025.