B. A. Grisham

Dr. Blake A. Grisham is from Black Oak, Arkansas, a Delta cotton town named for a tree that will not grow in its bottoms, and he has spent a career refusing to leave that kind of question alone. Every degree he holds was earned in oak country: a wildlife biology bachelor’s from Arkansas State, up Highway 18 from the family rows; a master’s spent trailing wild turkey gobblers through Louisiana bottomland hardwoods; a doctorate on lesser prairie-chickens in the shinnery oak grasslands of the Southern High Plains. The federal government later seated him on the Species Status Assessment science team that weighed that grouse’s future, and his name rides both the bird’s genome and the population genomics that reshaped its place in policy. Twelve years a research professor at Texas Tech, he published more than forty peer-reviewed papers, ran field crews that put bands on more than a thousand wild birds, was named Educator of the Year by the Texas Chapter of The Wildlife Society, and advised a student chapter from six members to State and National Chapter of the Year, seeding a generation of working biologists across state and federal agencies. He left the university in 2025 to found Grisham Field & Feather LLC and its imprint, Grisham Field Press, and put the company’s field office back on Buffalo Island. Clouds is his first book.