William Dietrich was born in 1951 and grew up in Tacoma, WA. A journalism graduate of Western Washington University, he has spent most of his life in the Pacific Northwest, with briefer sojourns in Washington, D.C., and Boston. He spent a year at Harvard University at the Nieman fellowship program for journalists, was a fellow at the Woods Hole Marine Biological Laboratory in Massachusetts, and has won numerous journalism awards. He is married, has two college-age daughters, and lives in Anacortes, WA.