Raised in a town sandwiched between Philadelphia and the Pine Barrens, Jackson Kuhl grew up enamored with colonial history and the privateers and smugglers who once lurked in New Jersey’s marshy coves. Later, after moving north and doing graduate work in archaeology, this fascination culminated in Jackson’s first book, Samuel Smedley, Connecticut Privateer, a biography of the American Revolution’s most daring sea captain.
A steady diet of Hawthorne, Poe, M.R. James, and Robert Aickman soon leaked into his writing. Jackson’s debut novel, A Season of Whispers, is a gothic mystery that takes place within a 19th-century transcendentalist commune. This was followed by The Island of Small Misfortunes, a ghost story set among Connecticut’s Thimble Islands.
Jackson has worked more than twenty years as a freelance writer and journalist. Some of the most exciting stories he wrote involved a deserted town located on a sandbar, the ruins of an Olympian’s private island, a wrongful police shooting, ghostwritten memoirs, and interviewing archaeologists and paleontologists for children’s magazines. The boring stuff was about taxes.
His articles and essays have appeared in Atlas Obscura, Connecticut Magazine, Electric Literature, Journal of the American Revolution, National Geographic News, New York Post, and numerous local newspapers, many of them now extinct.
Jackson lives in coastal Connecticut. Visit his website at jacksonkuhl.com
