The Life Behind the Stories

Samuel Rice was born in the hills of Southeastern Kentucky the day after John F. Kennedy was assassinated, an era marked by loss, reflection, and a shift in the American spirit. The youngest of five children, he was raised by loving, God-fearing parents who taught him integrity, compassion, and the quiet wisdom found in nature.

Samuel attended a small college outside Lexington before moving to Tampa, where he continued his studies in philosophy at the University of South Florida. Philosophy became his early foundation; an invitation to think deeply, question boldly, and explore the unseen layers of life. While in Tampa, he managed the famed Dessert Room at Bern’s Steak House in Tampa, where discipline and creativity met the rhythm of hospitality.

A spontaneous move to New Jersey, just outside New York City, awakened another unexpected talent: sewing. What began as curiosity grew into a full drapery manufacturing business. Eventually he moved into Manhattan, absorbing the city’s energy before continuing his entrepreneurial journey in South Florida. There, Samuel built a successful international drapery company that flourished for 18 years, until the economic collapse of 2008 dismantled nearly everything he had built. By 2011, he had lost his home, his business, his friends, and even his pets.

At his mother’s loving insistence, he returned to Lexington to rebuild. Not long after, a near-fatal car accident placed him in a coma and cost him his spleen. After a year of recovery and an attempt to restart his business in Florida, life brought him back once again to Kentucky. He stepped away from the life he had known, spending time rebuilding both his health and his sense of purpose before beginning a new chapter working at a local casino.

It was there, quietly, unexpectedly, that everything changed. Samuel began studying Hermeticism, astrology, Kabbalah, and other metaphysical traditions. His lifelong philosophical curiosity deepened into spiritual exploration, and writing became both expression and revelation.

After 7½ years at the casino, he faced a moral crossroads. He had grown close to the patrons and could no longer support a system built on other people’s losses. Leaving was a leap of integrity and the beginning of his creative renaissance.

In the months that followed, writing became an extraordinary period of creative discovery. Samuel began moving freely across genres, following each story wherever it wanted to go; from intimate novels of family, friendship, and human connection to memoir, humor, mystery, speculative fiction, and explorations of the unknown. What emerged was not a single kind of writer, but a storyteller increasingly comfortable with the full range of his curiosity. Whether writing about an ordinary encounter that quietly changes a life or a mystery that reaches beyond what we think we know, Samuel continues to return to the questions that have followed him throughout his life: Who are we? What connects us? And what might be possible?

He currently lives in Lexington, Kentucky, where he continues to write stories that explore memory, wonder, and the extraordinary beauty hidden within ordinary life. Whether through speculative fiction, heartfelt memoir, or quiet reflections on the human experience, his hope remains the same: to leave readers seeing the world, and their own lives, with renewed appreciation.