Hal Blythe

Hal Blythe, Ph.D., is a Foundation Professor of English at Eastern Kentucky University and co-director of the EKU Teaching and Learning Center. With his longtime collaborator Charlie Sweet, he has co-authored more than twelve hundred published works, including seventeen books, literary criticism, educational research, and short fiction. He earned his Ph.D. at the University of Louisville in 1972.

Blythe and Sweet write fiction together under the joint pen name Hal Charles, a name actually given to them by Ellery Queen's Mystery Magazine after EQMM published one of their early stories in 1980. Together they have ghostwritten more than thirty Mike Shayne novellas for Mike Shayne Mystery Magazine and published over one hundred short stories in popular magazines, including ongoing appearances in Ellery Queen's Mystery Magazine and Woman's World. Their fiction leans toward mystery, suspense, and short puzzle-driven stories.

On the craft side, Blythe has written three nonfiction books on writing and more than twenty-five articles for Writer's Digest on pedagogy and writing craft, plus co-authored The Writer's Digest Character Naming Sourcebook with Sherrilyn Kenyon and Charlie Sweet, a reference offering more than twenty thousand character names organized by origin, gender association, and genre fit, plus strategies for selecting and inventing names that match a story's tone.

Blythe and Sweet co-authored the New Forums Press It Works for Me teaching series, which runs to at least eight volumes covering teaching, online teaching, scholar-teaching, creativity, and faculty development. He has also produced television scripts for EKU-TV's Keys to Communication series and over a hundred scholarly articles in academic journals across literature and pedagogy.