Noel Logan, the first dues-paying member of the Chattanooga Writers Guild, was born in Chickamauga, Georgia, in 1942. He grew up in a nearby north Georgia neighborhood known to the locals as “Hells’ Holler.” At fourteen he left home with his cousin, bound for Los Angeles where he joined the US Navy at age fifteen using a forged birth certificate. The following year he married childhood friend and sweetheart Shirley Jo Perkins. He and Shirley were lovers, friends and co-workers for the next forty years until Shirley suffered a sudden fatal heart attack in 1999. He and Shirley are blessed with three children, seven grandchildren and four great grandchildren.

With an affinity for writing, Noel has practiced the craft in one form or another throughout his entire life. He began writing poetry as a teenager, and has authored more than three dozen poems. During his thirty year career as a labor leader, he edited and published three different union publications; The Express, circulation 5000, 1978-1991, The Unionist, circulation 1500, 1991-1996, and United We Stand, circulation 90,000, 1994-1996. He retired and moved to the country in 1996 after serving thirty years as an elected officer of the Teamsters union. His plans to write fiction and memoirs upon his retirement were delayed by the untimely loss of Shirley. Noel’s short story in 2003, "The First Time I saw Santa Claus," was selected for reading on National Public Radio, WUTC, and Voices from Home during the Christmas season that year. His short story, "Without a Gun," was awarded first place in the nonfiction category of the Georgia Writers Association’s contest for aspiring writers of the Southeastern United States, in 2004, and published in the anthology, Lessons Learned, Volume II, in 2005. Noel’s first novel, a mystery with working title Riding the Tiger, is in progress.

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