Doug Dorst is a graduate of the Iowa Writers’ Workshop, a former Wallace Stegner Fellow at Stanford University, and a recipient of fellowships from the National Endowment for the Arts, the James Michener/Copernicus Society, and the MacDowell Colony. Alive in Necropolis is his first novel.

His first short-story collection, The Surf Guru, is forthcoming from Riverhead Books in 2009. His stories have appeared in McSweeney’s, Ploughshares, The Atlantic Unbound, The Sun, ZYZZYVA, and other journals.

His first play, Monster in the Dark, a collaboration with foolsFURY Theater Company, had runs in San Francisco and Berkeley earlier this year. The San Francisco Examiner found Monster “masterful… fascinating throughout,” and SF Weekly cited the play in naming foolsFURY San Francisco’s Best Theater Company of 2008.

A longtime resident of the San Francisco Bay Area, Doug holds a BA from Stanford and a JD from UC-Berkeley’s Boalt Hall, and he has taught writing at Stanford and in the MFA program at the California College of the Arts.

He currently lives in Austin, Texas, where he is an assistant professor of creative writing at St. Edward’s University and serves on the Board of Directors of Austin Bat Cave, a non-profit writing center for kids. He lives in the Crestview neighborhood with his wife and a few friendly animals.

A three-time Jeopardy! champion and a participant in the show’s 2006 Tournament of Champions, he is unlikely ever to forget that the chemical symbol for tungsten is W.