R A Card grew up in Massachusetts and went to the University of Massachusetts and Harvard. He has wandered the country, hitchhiking, riding buses, hopping freight trains, and riding his bicycle from Massachusetts to Alaska. He has lived in Key West, Brooklyn, Pratt, Kansas, and Kona, Hawaii, and by the time he was twenty-four had visited all fifty states. His literary work has appeared in Alaska Magazine, The New England Journal of Public Policy, Omphalos Quarterly and numerous other publications. He is the author of several works of fiction and poetry, including Life of a Dead White Man and 52 Poems, Seven Sonnets.