Justin St. Germain was born in Philadelphia in 1981. His family (his mother, his older brother, and he) moved frequently before fetching up in Tombstone, Arizona, where he was mostly raised. It was there, when the author was twenty, that the pivotal event in his life took place: his mother was shot to death by her fifth husband. St. Germain earned a B.A, and an MFA at the University of Arizona in Tuscon and was a Wallace Stegner Fellow at Stanford. In 2013 his memoir Son of a Gun appeared, in which he sought to understand his mother's life and to make sense of her death, and addressed broader, associated issues. The book won a Barnes & Noble Discover Award in Nonfiction and was on many Best Book of 2013 lists. including those at Publishers Weekly and Salon. St. Germain's writing has appeared in The New York Times, The New York Times Book Review, The Guardian, The Best of the West, and in other publications. He is currently the Joseph M. Russo Professor in Creative Writing at the University of New Mexico.
