Adam Van Winkle was born and raised in Texoma on both sides of the Oklahoma-Texas border and currently resides with his wife and two sons in South Carolina.
His writing has appeared in places like Bull Men's Fiction, The Dead Mule School of Southern Literature , Red Dirt Forum, Cheap Pop!, Crack the Spine, Vignette Review, Steel Toe Review, Dirty Chai, and Pithead Chapel.
His debut novel, Abraham Anyhow, was published by Red Dirt Press in March 2017 and selected by The Southern Literary Review as the June 2017 Read of the Month and featured in Monkeybicycle's If My Book series in July 2017. An excerpt of the novel has also received a Pushcart Nomination. Its style has been compared to the likes of John Steinbeck and Billie Letts and Donald Ray Pollock among others.
His second novel, While They were in the Field was released by Red Dirt Press in January 2019. In September 2019, his novella about wrestlers and some kids in a small town for an indie wrestling show one Fall night in 1997 called HARDWAY JUICE was published.
In 2020 he published The Red Knife Plays, plays adapted from the Appalachian gothic fiction of Sheldon Lee Compton, and an original 3-act play about retired wrestlers in a nursing home, Two Eunices.
In Summer of 2015 he founded Cowboy Jamboree Magazine, named for the cowboy end of workday campfire song tradition to publish and promote gritty rural and rough hewn stories influenced by the likes of Harry Crews, Larry Brown, Barry Hannah, Bobbie Ann Mason, Dorothy Allison, and Donald Ray Pollock among others. Cowboy Jamboree issues now receive thousands of readers. Since 2019, Van Winkle has been lead designer and editor for Cowboy Jamboree Press books.
Van Winkle is named for the oldest Cartwright son on Bonanza.
