Joey Goebel

Adam Joseph Goebel III was born in 1980 in Henderson, Kentucky, a small town on the Ohio River across from Evansville, Indiana. His parents, Adam Goebel of Louisville, and Nancy Bingemer of Henderson, were both social workers and met in Frankfort. His older sister CeCe is also a social worker.

Goebel attended a Catholic school for eight years. He then entered the public high school system and became enamored with punk rock. He learned to play guitar and soon thereafter started a band called The Mullets. From ages fifteen to twenty, Goebel fronted the Mullets, playing throughout the Midwest and releasing four records.

Goebel attended Brescia University in Owensboro, Kentucky, where he received an English degree with an emphasis in professional writing. For the college newspaper he wrote humor pieces and features. Once he asked students for quotes without telling them what his article was about, which resulted in an absurd feature built around random sentences. Another semester, he kept track of how many sneezing students received “God bless you’s” in order to report how holy the Catholic university truly was.

Goebel had loved reading and writing since the age of five, but it was the charismatic English teachers at Brescia who helped him to realize that writing, not music, was where his future lay. At eighteen he got his first writing job reviewing records for News 4U, a Midwest entertainment magazine. Seldom was a review of his not a scathing chastisement of performers he considered undeserving of their record deals. Also during college, Goebel became an aspiring screenwriter. By graduation, he had written four screenplays, the last one being The Anomalies.

After countless agents and producers rejected his screenplay queries, Goebel wrote a novel version of The Anomalies. After then being thoroughly rejected by book agents, he decided to pitch his manuscript to independent publishers who might take a chance on unique material. Pat Walsh, editor of MacAdam/Cage of San Francisco, was intrigued by Goebel’s query, which would eventually result in The Anomalies’ publication in April of 2003.

The Anomalies was a Book Sense 76 title selected by the nation’s independent booksellers and was nominated for the Kentucky Literary Award. In the year following his book deal, Goebel wrote a longer, more ambitious novel, Torture the Artist, also to be released by MacAdam/Cage in fall of 2004.

Goebel’s protagonists are intelligent rebels, sensible madmen, and rejected dreamers disgusted by a society that embraces Justin Timberlake. His prose laments the absence of originality and values in contemporary culture.

Goebel currently lives in Henderson, where he is probably writing, searching for employment, selling records on E-bay, and battling a sinus infection.

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