Joe Bond is an award-winning short story writer whose debut novel Hope House explores the lives of a group of troubled teenage boys in a treatment program in the late 1980s. Bond grew up around such homes in eastern Kentucky and began working in them when he was still in high school, starting out on night shift and later spending his summers as the primary child care worker for a group of teenagers barely younger than he was. He heard firsthand the stories of hundreds of boys and followed their journeys from intake to aftercare. He took them home when they graduated and searched for them when they ran away.

He began drafting Hope House after his story “Damico” won The Masters Review Short Story Award. The first pages were put down in Atlanta, much of the writing was done in Manhattan at the height of the pandemic, and the novel was completed where he lives now with his family in New Orleans.