Dave Eggers is the author of four previous books- What is the What, A Heartbreaking Work of Staggering Genius, You Shall Know Our Velocity, and How We are Hungry. He is the editor of McSweeney's, a quarterly magazine and book-publishing company, and is co-founder of 826 Valencia, a network of nonprofit writing and tutoring centers for young people. As a journalist, his work has appeared in The New Yorker, Esquire, and The Believer.

In 2004 he co-taught a class at the UC Berkeley Graduate School of Journalism, out of which grew the Voice of Witness series of books, designed to illuminate contemporary human crises through oral history. The first in the series, Surviving Justice: America's Wrongfully Convicted and Exonerated, was published in 2005. Voices from the Storm, about the residents of New Orleans who survived Hurricane Katrina, will appear in fall of 2006. The next in the series will give voice to former slaves in Sudan.

He lives in the San Francisco Bay area with his wife and daughter.