Click for photographer's information
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.
Since graduating, Keith has spent his time dabbling in new and interesting forms of storytelling. He has written several children’s picture books and worked as a creative director during the early stages of development of an interactive cell phone game. He developed a working prototype of a competitive board game based on the traditional Japanese kaiju (monster) movie. He has built from the ground-up several realistic and complex fantasy worlds for use in table-top role-playing and in his novel-in-progress Daughters of Oyr (a working title). He is an active and serious (though his players consider him heartless) Storyteller and Game Master in many forms of table-top roleplaying.
Beyond the creative realms, he has invested his time in other soul searching and life-enriching activities. 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. 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 Franklin, Tennessee with his lovely wife Freya and chaotic evil, toilet trained cats. He is currently attending the University of Southern Maine Stonecoast MFA program in Popular Fiction. He hopes to one day teach creative writing at the college level.
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.