According to Wikipedia, Barney Carlos Lee Barney Dews was born in Nacogdoches, Texas on September 26, 1963. He received his BA from the University of Texas at Austin, his MA and PhD from the University of Minnesota. His dissertation was based on the unfinished autobiography of Carson McCullers. He later expanded and published it as Illumination and Night Glare in 2002. He became a tenured professor at the University of West Florida in 1999. He was the Founding Director of the Carson McCullers Center for Writers and Musicians, Columbus State University, serving in that capacity from 2001 to 2003. The Center is located in the McCullers family home at 1519 Stark Avenue, Columbus, Georgia. In addition to editing and publishing Illumination and Night Glare, he edited the Library of America volume of her collected works as well as publishing a number of scholarly articles on McCullers. After ten years of university teaching, in 2006 Dews returned to graduate school and completed an M. F. A. in Fiction writing, after which he relocated to Rome, Italy, where he is, as of 2014, an associate professor and chair of the department of English at John Cabot University, as well as being the director of the Institute for Creative Writing and Literary Translation, and director of Italy Reads in Rome. His most recent works of fiction is a thriller series written in collaboration with S. J. Rozan, jointly using the pseudonym of Sam Cabot.