Harvey Estes is originally from Birmingham, Alabama. He attended college at the nearby University of Montevallo, where he received a BA in English. Later he attended seminary at Duke Divinity School and served as a pastor in the North Carolina Conference of the United Methodist Church. He currently lives in Greenville, NC, where he works as a full-time puzzle constructor. His puzzles have appeared in newspapers such as the New York Sun, the Wall Street Journal, the Washington Post, and the Los Angeles Times. Other venues include Simon & Schuster, Publications International, Dell Crosswords, Games Magazine, and many others.