Doug Dorst is the author of the novel “Alive in Necropolis” and the story collection “The Surf Guru,” which will be published in July.

The New York Times called “Alive in Necropolis” a “daring and big-hearted first novel … Like Dashiell Hammett, Dorst conveys a hard-bitten love of the physical San Francisco.” USA Today added that “In the same way Buffy the Vampire Slayer mixed high school and bloodsuckers, Doug Dorst combines cops and ghosts in his Alive in Necropolis. The result is a haunted variation on Ed McBain’s 87th Precinct series… Imaginative and accomplished… Pitch-perfect.” 

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 McDowell 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 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 B.A. from Stanford and a J.D. 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.

Visit him online at www.dougdorst.com.