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Keith R. Potempa was born and raised in the home of the fully loaded hot dog, the deep dish pizza, and the all-American political scandal; Chicago, Illinois. He found his passion for the written word early on, as he devoured the works of the great triple-named masters of the speculative realms: Ursula K. LeGuin, Marion Zimmer Bradley, Gabriel Garcia Marquez, among others.
He graduated from Columbia College Chicago with a B.A. in Fiction Writing. There he both participated in and taught workshop classes through the critically acclaimed Story Workshop® approach.
Keith is an active enthusiast of both meditation and yoga. He is an amateur home brewer of hard-to-find beers, such as the double-chocolate stout and the pumpkin ale. He is an active and serious (though his players consider him heartless) Storyteller and Game Master in many forms of table-top roleplaying. Keith holds the highest rank of the Boy Scouts of America; the esteemed Eagle Scout Award, and is proud to be of a rich family tradition in scouting. He is an outdoorsman in every sense of the word, and his secret unstoppable fire-starter recipe is patent-pending.
He currently resides in Nashville, Tennessee with his lovely wife Freya and a brood of chaotic evil cats . He is attending the University of Southern Maine Stonecoast MFA program in Popular Fiction.
Keith was awarded first place in the Union League Civic & Arts Foundation‘s Fiction Contest for Young Writers in 2006. His writing can be found in several small-press publications including Hairtrigger, Storyteller, and midwestbookreview.com, among others.
