Samuel Risley is a writer, artist, and editor from Rhode Island. He began writing horror stories at the age of ten before turning to literary fiction and poetry in his early teens. A voracious reader of modernist literature, he was particularly drawn to the work of Ernest Hemingway and F. Scott Fitzgerald, as well as later authors such as Jack Kerouac. At fifteen, Risley founded The Post-Finalist, a print-only literary and visual magazine for the Post-Final Generation, a group of writers and artists whose work focuses on the interconnected lives of young people moving through (and rebelling against) the modern digital age, ranging from dirty realism to satire. During this period, he wrote his first full-length autobiographical story collection, a sequence of lived fragments centered on friendship, art, reading, boredom, and self-invention in Rhode Island. Across both writing and visual art, his work is concerned with place, memory, and the spontaneity of life.
