Damon Shackleford grew up along the Ohio River in Evansville, Indiana, and studied architectural history at Ball State University before earning an MFA in creative writing from the University of Minnesota. He has worked as a night-shift custodian, a church organ tuner, and a projectionist at a single-screen cinema, jobs that fed his fascination with abandoned spaces and the stories people leave behind. His fiction has appeared in regional magazines and small press anthologies, and he received a Lake Superior Writers fellowship in 2021. He lives in Minneapolis with a rescue dog and too many maps, and volunteers with a nonprofit that documents Midwestern historic structures.
