Brief biographies are, like history texts, too organized to be other than
orderly misrepresentations of the truth. So when it's written that Lucius
Shepard was born in August of 1947 to Lucy and William Shepard in Lynchburg,
Virginia, and raised thereafter in Daytona Beach, Florida, it provides a
statistical hit and gives you nothing of the difficult childhood from which he
frequently attempted to escape, eventually succeeding at the age of fifteen,
when he traveled to Ireland aboard a freighter and thereafter spent several
years in Europe, North Africa, and Asia, working in a cigarette factory in
Germany, in the black market of Cairo's Khan al Khalili bazaar, as a night club
bouncer in Spain, and in numerous other countries at numerous other
occupations. On returning to the United States, Shepard entered the University
of North Carolina, where for one semester he served as the co-editor of the
Carolina Quarterly. Either he did not feel challenged by the curriculum, or
else he found other pursuits more challenging. Whichever the case, he dropped
out several times and traveled to Spain, Southeast Asia (at a time when tourism
there was generally discouraged), and South and Central America. He ended his
academic career as a tenth-semester sophomore with a heightened political
sensibility, a fairly extensive knowledge of Latin American culture and some
pleasant memories.
Toward the beginning of his stay at the university, Shepard met Joy Wolf, a
fellow student, and they were married, a union that eventually produced one
son, Gullivar, now an architect in New York City. While traveling cross-country
to California, they had their car break down in Detroit and were forced to take
jobs in order to pay for repairs. As fortune would have it, Shepard joined a
band, and passed the better part of the 1970s playing rock and roll in the
Midwest. When an opportunity presented itself, usually in the form of a band
break-up, he would revisit Central America, developing a particular affection
for the people of Honduras. He intermittently took odd jobs, working as a
janitor, a laborer, a sealer of driveways, and, in a nearly soul-destroying few
months, a correspondent for Blue Cross/Blue Shield, a position that compelled
him to call the infirm and the terminally ill to inform them they had misfiled
certain forms and so were being denied their benefits.
In 1980 Shepard attended the Clarion Writers’ Workshop at Michigan State
University and thereafter embarked upon a writing career. He sold his first
story, "Black Coral," in 1981 to New Dimensions, an anthology edited by
Marta Randall. During a prolonged trip to Central America, covering a period
from 1981-1982, he worked as a freelance journalist focusing on the civil war
in El Salvador. Since that time he has mainly devoted himself to the writing of
fiction. His novels and stories have earned numerous awards in both the genre
and the mainstream. He currently lives in Vancouver, WA.