Bio
Porter Shreve was born in Washington, DC, in 1966, and moved around a lot as a kid, from Maryland to Charlottesville to Philadelphia to Houston before returning to his parents' hometown of Washington in the mid 1970s. He spent his teens and twenties as a landscaper, housepainter, clean water canvasser, U.S. Senate page, butcher's apprentice, hotel desk clerk, mail room sorter, courier and MacNeil/Lehrer NewsHour intern, and he attended a variety of colleges, among them the University of Missouri Journalism School in Columbia. He worked for four years on the night city desk at the Washington Post as an editorial assistant and freelance journalist, while finishing his B.A. at American University. Around this time, 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 left journalism for the M.F.A. program at the University of Michigan. There, he 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, a Book Sense pick, and a Borders Original Voices selection. His second novel, Drives Like a Dream, was a 2005 Chicago Tribune Book of the Year, a People "Great Reads" selection, and a Britannica Book of the Year. Mariner Houghton Mifflin will publish his third novel, When the White House Was Ours, in September.
Shreve has coedited six anthologies and published fiction, nonfiction and book reviews in many journals and magazines, including Witness, Northwest Review, Salon, the Chicago Tribune, the San Francisco Chronicle, the Boston Globe and the New York Times. He lives with his wife, the writer Bich Minh Nguyen, in Chicago and West Lafayette, Indiana.
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