Porter Shreve grew up in Washington, DC, and has lived in Maryland, Virginia, Pennsylvania, Texas, Ohio, Missouri, England, Israel, Massachusetts, Michigan, Oregon, North Carolina, Illinois, Indiana, and California. For several years in his twenties he worked on the night city desk at the Washington Post, and to gear himself up for the long haul of writing books, he rode a bike from Washington State to Massachusetts. His first novel, The Obituary Writer (2000), was a New York Times Notable Book; his second and third, Drives Like a Dream (2005) and When the White House Was Ours (2008), were Chicago Tribune Books of the Year; and his fourth, The End of the Book (2014), was a San Francisco Chronicle Book of the Year. He has coedited six anthologies and published fiction, nonfiction, Op-Eds and book reviews in many journals, magazines and newspapers, including Witness, Northwest Review, Salon, the Chicago Tribune, the San Francisco Chronicle, the Boston Globe, the Washington Post and the New York Times. He has been a guest on NPR's Morning Edition and the Diane Rehm Show, among other programs, and he teaches in the MFA in Writing Program at the University of San Francisco and the Low-Residency MFA Program in Creative Writing at Pacific University in Oregon. He lives with his wife, writer Bich Minh Nguyen, and their two children in the Bay Area.