David Somerfleck is an award-winning speculative fiction author, poet, and retired digital marketing agency and mediation nonprofit owner writing from the Tidewater area of Hampton Roads, Virginia. He came to fiction following the long road: through a quarter-century of consultancy, journalism, political campaign advising, startup advising, and college teaching, before setting all of it aside to do the one thing the entire career had been quietly rehearsing him to do.

Literary Work

His debut novel, One Grain of Sand, opens the Shards of a Shattered Sky trilogy. It imagines a near-future America that has made weekend minority “culls” legal, and that auctions healthcare, travel, and the right to be left alone as prizes on reality television. The book won the Literary Titan Book Award, took a Readers’ Favorite Five-Star Seal, and drew an overwhelming positive review from Kirkus, the field’s sternest arbiter, that called it “riveting and frighteningly plausible.”

Beneath the fiction runs a second current, the poetry: Love Her Blind and Other Poems, Join the Flock and Other Poems, and Nothing to Do but Stay, verse that Literary Titan described as turning bruised memory into fierce, strange music. From the marketing years he also drew the instructional workbook The Road to Digital Marketing Profits.

Long before the books, he worked as a freelance commercial copywriter and editor, a community-newspaper beat reporter, and a lifestyle-magazine writer. His titles sell worldwide today and can be borrowed through library systems across the country in print and digital editions.

Marketing and Professional Background

For more than two decades, Somerfleck ran his own digital-marketing agency, steering projects and shaping copy for multimillion-dollar brands. For roughly ten years he served as a Certified Small Business Mentor with the U.S. Small Business Administration (SBA), counseling hundreds of startups and nonprofits on how to grow, and he mentored founders through the Catch a Fire and Ureeka nonprofits besides.

His teaching and public-speaking life ran alongside the agency work: he has taught college English, tutored writing, and directed a grant-funded adult GED program, and he has led workshops on technology and marketing for the WordPress Foundation, Microsoft, and Johnson & Wales University. Trained in political-campaign messaging by a consortium that included the Center for Progressive Leadership and the Colorado Board of Education, he went on to advise six political campaigns and to found a nonprofit devoted to court mediation.

You can follow his coming releases, podcast episodes, and speaking dates at his official website, Boldly Blue. For a full list of links, visit Bookish.Blue.