Dark tales, sharp eye, Southern roots.

Van Temple is a Southern-born writer whose stories come soaked in humidity, heartache, and history. Raised in Ruston, Louisiana, and a graduate of Louisiana Tech University, Van spent over four decades working in the guts of community development, nonprofit leadership, and city government. From Texas to Indiana, he witnessed the fragile machinery of public service, and the people caught inside it.

After 43 years in the field, Van retired to Southampton, Pennsylvania, to do something riskier than policy reform: write fiction. His work is informed by a life spent fighting for civil rights, affordable housing, and economic justice. He doesn’t write heroes. He writes real people, scrappy, stubborn, and stuck somewhere between good intentions and impossible choices.

A published author of three books and dozens of stories and poems, Van is a member of four writing groups: Bayou Writer’s Club, Trois Ecrivains, Writer’s Roundtable, and Sages. His fiction is driven by moral tension and quiet rebellion, wrapped in dark wit and characters who know how to sweat. You’ll find traces of environmental stewardship, grassroots politics, and the South’s haunted past stitched through every sentence.

When not writing, Van stays busy grand-parenting, running, remodeling homes, and continuing his lifelong commitment to justice, from voter activation to environmental protection. He's still trying to change the world… but now he does it one sentence at a time.

If you like stories that ask hard questions, dig up buried truths, and haunt you just a little, Van Temple is your kind of writer.