Casey Spitnale lives in Bryan, Ohio. A quiet village known for inventing the Etch-A-Sketch and producing every Dum Dum sucker you have ever unwrapped. Every single one. In a world full of noise and distraction, Bryan offers the kind of stillness where stories grow.
He shares that stillness with his wife Tris and their five kids: Luke, Harrison, Wesley, Lora, and Josie. Sharp-eyed readers might notice a few of those names found their way into Behind the Sunshade. Wesley is the protagonist learning to see in the dark. Lora lent her name to an early draft of the story's love interest, back when the manuscript was held together with seventeen different file-naming conventions and a prayer.
Casey dropped out of college to tour with a band for four years. That chapter of his life taught him how stories live in failure as much as success, and how the best ones come from showing up anyway. Also how to load a bread truck in under nine minutes. Nobody asked him to get good at that. He just did. He eventually traded guitar strings for code, building a career as a designer, animator, and marketer through his company Vesst. But the storytelling never stopped.
Behind the Sunshade is his second book, following Promised Paradise. It began as a question: What if the light we trusted was the lie? The answer became a dystopian world of vertical cities, blocked suns, and truths hidden in darkness.
When he's not writing, Casey coaches youth sports and drinks coffee. Preferably in that order, but the order stopped mattering around kid number three.