Meet Your Neighbor is a weekly feature by Spartan Weekly News writer Grace Anne Johnson. If you’d like to be featured or know someone that would be a great candidate to be featured, please email us at sprtnwkly@aol.com or call 864.574.1360.
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Local author Zach Steele has spent his life mastering the art of storytelling.
“I always go back to Charlotte’s Web and Tales of a Fourth Grade Nothing,” he recalls. “Those were the books that made me love reading. But the more I read, the more I wanted to tell stories. I think the first story I wrote, I was probably 12, and I loved it so much. I just kept doing it, and so I spent my entire life learning the craft and learning how to tell stories.”
An Atlanta native, Steele moved to the Spartanburg area almost five years ago. When asked why, he laughs a little.
"A pandemic love story,” he shares. “I had connected with somebody in a writing circle in the Atlanta area who had moved up here, and we just started chatting, as we all were doing at that point—just chatting online. We made a good connection, and since I was working from home at the time, I decided to come up here and see what it was all about.” Steele has called Spartanburg home ever since.
A little over a year ago, he began working as the bookstore manager at Hub City Bookshop, a full-service independent bookstore in downtown Spartanburg. For someone who loves books as dearly as Steele does, the role was a natural fit.
He shares that he loves cultivating the store’s inventory to discover books that customers will want to read, and that he’s excited to see the store continue to develop and grow.
“I love kids’ books, and we’re actually getting ready to have a big construction project here where we’ll expand the back of the store to create a dedicated kids’ section.” Not only will this allow for a more expansive selection of children’s literature—it will also allow Hub City to devote more space to exciting new adult reads as well.
Personally, Steele shares that he reads “constantly,” and that his selections range across the board. As the founder of Broadleaf Writers in Atlanta, Steele is always reading the work of fellow writers in the group. In his spare time, he also enjoys fiction stories that incorporate humor, classic mysteries, fantasy, and sci-fi.
Steele’s voracious reading habits have inspired him to publish four novels—one of which, The Weight of Ashes, earned him a nomination for Georgia Author of the Year in 2021. The story is rooted in southern folklore and explores the myriad of ways in which people process grief.
His next novel, Perfectly Normal, is currently out in audiobook and eBook, and will be published physically later this year. It follows an autistic boy with chromosthesia—a neurological phenomenon in which someone sees colors when they hear sound. The boy is musically gifted, and lives in a world filled with color, order, and structure. When his life turns upside down, he goes on a quest to try to understand what it means to be normal in a world that tells him he’s anything but.
Since coming to Spartanburg, Steele has enjoyed having the opportunity to explore the area’s rich literary history. “There are a lot of notable Southern writers that come from this area,” he shares. “There’s so much to learn.”
He also shares that he’s enjoyed getting to know the writing and reading community of Spartanburg. “It’s this very strong literary town,” he says. “It’s very strong, and getting to be a part of that has been really great.”
Know someone who should be featured? Nominate them via email at sprtnwkly@aol.com.
