J.E. Tolbert was born and raised in Maryland, where he had an early interest in pictures, words, and music. As a child, he was a fan of Tolkien’s works and eventually moved on to Asimov’s Robot Trilogy. As an adult, he became enamored with modernist and surrealist literature from the early half of the 20th century, absorbing the works of Franz Kafka, Hermann Hesse, and Virginia Wolf among others. While working as a graphic designer, he wrote poetry as another one of his creative outlets. These poems evolved into short stories and novels, one of which is Arsalan the Magnificent. He considers himself a poet and writer of literary fiction who sometimes writes within the fantasy genre, a cross-hybridization that he believes enriches both literary and genre fiction.