After growing up in small-town West Texas and attending college in Minnesota, I lived abroad for five years. I led a group that built a medical dispensary in the Ivory Coast, pulled pints in a London pub, traveled overland from Brazil to the US. While living in Paris, I wrote more than 60 features on American sports for the French-language magazines SportTonic and US Foot.My first book, Fire on the Beach: Recovering the Lost Story of Richard Etheridge and the Pea Island Lifesavers (Scribner 2001, Oxford University Press paper 2002), was a New Yorker notable selection and one of the St. Louis Post-Dispatch's "Best Books of 2001;" the Memphis Flyer called it "social history at its readable best." I wrote the screenplay for the documentary, Rescue Men, based on the book. Magic Johnson's Aspire network premiered it on September 15, 2012.My fiction and essays have been recognized with awards from the Zora Neale Hurston/Richard Wright Foundation, the Texas Institute of Letters and the National Endowment for the Humanities, among others, and appeared in The Village Voice, The Kenyon Review, Newsday, Callaloo, The Massachusetts Review, The Chronicle of Higher Education, and elsewhere. A former Fulbright Fellow to Brazil, I teach at the University of Illinois.Please visit www.davidwrightbooks.com.