Charles West's fiction has appeared in Ellery Queen Mystery Magazine, Isaac Asimov Science Fiction Magazine and Hardboiled. He has been an English teacher in Fresno, California for more than 20 years. He was a National Endowment for the Humanities Fellow in Shakespeare, a Council for Basic Education Award recipient in Chicano literature, and a fellow at the Teaching Shakespeare Institute at Georgetown University and the Folger Shakespeare Library in Washington, D.C. He currently lives in the Sierra foothills with his wife and two daughters.