Bio

Charles B. Fancher is the author of Red Clay, the forthcoming historical novel from Blackstone Publishing. The novel, which covers the final months of the Civil War, Reconstruction and the early years of Jim Crow in the American South, is the latest turn in a wide-ranging career that spans journalism, public relations, and academia.

As a journalist, Fancher worked for The Philadelphia Inquirer, where he was an editor on the Foreign and News desks, and, as a reporter, he wrote features and covered higher education. He also worked for the Detroit Free Press, where he held a variety of positions, including Editor of Detroit Free Press Magazine, the newspaper’s Sunday magazine. His time at the Free Press, also included stints as a member of the Editorial Board, as the Deputy Business Editor, and as the Assistant to the Executive Editor. He began his journalism career as a broadcast reporter in Nashville, Tennessee for the local NBC-TV affiliate, WSM-TV (now WSMV-TV).

Fancher moved back and forth between journalism and public relations over the course of his career. As a corporate communications executive, he served as Vice President, Communications for the Corporation for Public Broadcasting in Washington, D.C. and as Vice President/Communications and Public Affairs for Philadelphia Newspapers, Inc., a wholly owned subsidiary of Knight-Ridder, Inc., then-publisher of The Philadelphia Inquirer and Philadelphia Daily News. He also directed the company’s philanthropic activities.

His public relations work also included operating a consultancy, Annapolis, Maryland-based Fancher Associates, which provided writing, editing, research and communications planning services to corporate and non-profit clients. His early public relations work included working as a publicist for the ABC Television Network in New York, assigned to programs produced by ABC Entertainment, ABC Sports and ABC News. He was also the Publicity Manager for the Opryland complex in Nashville, Tennessee.

In academia, Fancher was a Lecturer in the School of Communications at Howard University in Washington, D.C., where he served as Coordinator of the Strategic Communications sequence in the Department of Strategic, Legal and Management Communication and as interim Assistant Chair of the Department of Journalism. He has also been a member of the adjunct faculty of Temple University in Philadelphia, Pennsylvania.

He is a graduate of the University of Tennessee-Knoxville and a recipient of a National Endowment for the Humanities Fellowship for Journalists at the University of Michigan (now known as the Knight-Wallace Fellowships). He lives with his wife, former journalist Diane Brozek Fancher, in Pennsylvania’s Pocono Mountains.