Doug Dorst

Doug Dorst is the author of Alive in Necropolis, which was honored as San Francisco’s 2009 One City One Book selection, winner of the 2009 Emperor Norton Award, runner-up for the 2009 PEN/Hemingway, Shirley Jackson, and IAFA/Crawford Awards, a New York Times Book Review Editors’ Choice, and one of Amazon.com’s Best Books of 2008.

Doug 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.

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 critically-acclaimed runs in San Francisco and Berkeley in 2008, with SF Weekly citing the play in naming foolsFURY San Francisco’s Best Theater Company of the year.

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 now lives in Austin, Texas, and teaches writing at Texas State University - San Marcos. He also serves on the Board of Directors of Austin Bat Cave, a non-profit writing center for kids.

A three-time Jeopardy! champion, Doug appeared on the show’s 2006 Tournament of Champions. He wishes he had paid more attention in chemistry class so he could’ve nailed that question about tungsten, or wolfram.