Blake Gunnels is an award-winning novelist and practicing landscape architect based in Central Florida. His fiction is rooted in real coastal places he knows deeply, especially Saint Simons Island, Georgia, and the Cape Fear coast of North Carolina. His debut novel, By the Light of the Bluff, won the 2025 International Firebird Book Award for Southern Fiction, and his Cape Fear Thriller Series introduces Southport harbormaster Nora Banks.