J. B. Hickman

J. B. Hickman writes American coming-of-age fiction whose debut, The Keeper of Dawn, grew from an impression of seclusion at an all-boys school near Asheville, North Carolina. He transformed that setting into a fictional island academy where seventeen-year-old Jacob Hawthorne confronts privilege, loyalty, and the influence of a distant father. Shadeflower Press published the 287-page novel in 2012. Foreword Reviews selected it as among the young-reader fiction finalists of the 2012 INDIES awards, placing Hickman's first book within a national independent-publishing program. Hickman has explained that the invented island functions almost as another character, restricting the boys while giving their conflicts unusual intensity. The Keeper of Dawn combines an adolescent boarding-school story with family pressure and the consequences of adolescent alliances. Hickman's later projects have included a travel memoir and further fiction, but this novel remains the clearest introduction to his work because its landscape, paternal relationship, and enclosed social world were conceived together from the beginning.