Bio
Porter Shreve was born in Washington, DC, in 1966, and lived in Maryland, Charlottesville, Philadelphia and Houston before returning to his parents' hometown of Washington in the mid 1970s. He attended the University of Missouri Journalism School and worked nightside at the Washington Post while finishing his B.A. at American University. In his twenties he began a failed novel, which has since become a short story, about a Minneapolis weatherman with a paralyzing fear of the outdoors.
In 1996, after biking coast to coast with his brother from Anacortes, Washington to Woods Hole, Massachusetts Shreve went to the M.F.A. program at the University of Michigan and studied the novel and short story with Nicholas Delbanco, Charles Baxter and Lorrie Moore. After graduating from the program, he stayed in Ann Arbor and continued to teach in the University of Michigan's English Department. Since then he has taught at the University of Oregon, the University of North Carolina at Greensboro, and he currently directs the Creative Writing Program at Purdue University.
Shreve's first novel, The Obituary Writer, was a 2000 New York Times Notable Book and a Borders Original Voices selection. His second novel, Drives Like a Dream, was a 2005 Chicago Tribune Book of the Year and a People "Great Reads" selection. And his third novel, When the White House Was Ours, was a 2008 Chicago Tribune Book of the Year and a Reading Group Choices featured selection. He is working on a new novel based in part on a classic work of American fiction and set in Chicago of both the present day and the early 1900s.
Shreve has coedited six anthologies and published fiction, nonfiction, Op-Eds and book reviews in many journals and magazines, including Witness, Northwest Review, Salon, the Chicago Tribune, the San Francisco Chronicle, the Boston Globe, the Washington Post and the New York Times. He lives in Chicago and West Lafayette, Indiana with his wife Bich Minh Nguyen, author of the memoir Stealing Buddha's Dinner and a new novel, Short Girls.