Joe Coomer is a fiction and nonfiction writer who lives outside of Fort Worth, Texas, and on the coast of Maine. He "spends his winters in Springtown, Texas, where he runs a pair of large antique malls. He lives in a fairly new Victorian house that he spent a year and a half building in the late eighties, a project he wrote about in Dream House [1991]. His wife, Isabelle Tokumaru, runs her paintings conservation practice in the third story, while he writes novels in the kitchen, where the food is close. Summers, they live in Stonington, Maine, an active fishing village on the coast. When the weather's nice, he takes his old motor sailer, "Yonder", on day sails and cruises down east. He chronicled her purchase, restoration, and his stupidities at sea in Sailing in a Spoonful of Water [1997]."
The Decatur Road, St. Martin's Press, 1983, winner of the Jones Fiction Prize from the Texas Institute of Letters
Kentucky Love, St. Martin's Press, 1985, in which the lead character returns to the Appalachian hills to work on his grandfather's farm and looks back on his life and a love affair.
A Flatland Fable, Texas Monthly Press, 1986
Dream House, Faber & Faber, 1991, in which he describes the building of his home in Texas
The Loop, Faber & Faber, 1992, which was a New York Times Book of the Year in 1993 and currently in feature film post-production with a projected 2010 release date
Sailing in A Spoonful of Water, Picador, 1997, about restoring a 1934 motorsailer and learning to sail on the coast of Maine
Beachcombing for A Shipwrecked God, Graywolf Press, 1997
Apologizing to Dogs, Scribner, 1999
One Vacant Chair, Graywolf Press, 2003, winner of the S. Mariella Gable Prize