Henry Chappell

Novelist • Essayist • Journalist

Henry Chappell was born in Louisville, Kentucky in 1960 and grew up in central Kentucky in the small town of Campbellsville. He graduated from Western Kentucky University in 1982 and moved to the Dallas, Texas area where he worked as an electrical engineer in the defense industry. Weekends, he explored Texas through hunting, fishing, and birding trips.

In 1986, he read John Graves’ Goodbye to a River and knew then and there that he wanted to write. Shortly thereafter, his articles, essays and short stories began to appear in various regional and national magazines. Over the past two decades, he has written scores of articles for publications such as Orion, Field & Stream, Sports Afield, Gray’s Sporting Journal, Concho River Review, Texas Highways, GORP.com and Texas Parks & Wildlife.

In the mid 1990s, he began work on a series of essays about the powerful bonds that connect hunter, land, and prey. Nineteen of those essays were published collectively in February of 2001 as At Home on the Range with a Texas Hunter, which received an Excellence in Craft Award from the Texas Outdoor Writers Association.

Chappell’s first novel, The Callings, published in September of 2002, was a 2003 Spur Award finalist in the Western Writers of America “best first novel” category.

In 2003 Chappell teamed up with photographer Wyman Meinzer for a photostudy of the legendary Four Sixes Ranch. The result, 6666:Portrait of a Texas Ranch, was published in December of 2004.

His most recent novel, Blood Kin, was a 2005 Spur Award finalist in the “novel of the west” category and a runner-up for the TCU Texas Book Award.

Chappell is a contributing writer for Texas Parks & Wildlife, a field editor for The Land Report, and writes a regular column for Texas Wildlife.

He recently completed Silent We Stood, a novel about arson, lynching, and secessionist violence in Dallas in 1860.

In 2005, he and Wyman Meinzer teamed up again to create Working Dogs of Texas, published in 2009. Their latest collaboration, Under One Fence: The Waggoner Ranch Legacy was published in 2010.

Currently, Chappell is working on Right of Capture: The Looming Water Crisis in Texas.

Chappell has been a fulltime freelance writer since 1997. He lives with his family in Parker, Texas.