David Welky
David Welky is a failed grocery-store clerk, group-home attendant, house painter, roofer, amateur musician, pizza cook, and accounting major who decided the best way to make sense of his world was to study the past. He earned a Ph.D. from Purdue University and is now a Professor of American History at the University of Central Arkansas.
Welky’s works examine how ordinary people respond to moments of great change, stress, or crisis. His books include Marching Across the Color Line: A. Philip Randolph and Civil Rights in the World War II Era; The Thousand-Year Flood: The Ohio-Mississippi Disaster of 1937, which won the Booker Worthen Literary Prize and was named a Kirkus “Best Nonfiction Book” of 2011; and The Moguls and the Dictators: Hollywood and the Coming of World War II. His writings have also appeared in the New York Times, Memphis Commercial-Appeal, and St. Louis Post Dispatch.
Born in St. Louis, Welky now lives in Conway, Arkansas, with his wife and two book-loving children.
