Michael J. Vaughn grew up the son of a Navy pilot; his family wandered the country from Maine to Hawaii and eventually settled in Sunnyvale, California. He has a journalism degree from San Jose State, where he also sang tenor in the college choir, often in professional performances with the San Jose Symphony.

Vaughn has six published novels, and his poetry and short stories have appeared in more than forty literary journals. He has had residencies at Wyoming’s Ucross Foundation, Georgia’s Hambidge Center and southern California’s Dorland Mountain Colony, and has worked as publicity director at the Montalvo Center for the Arts in Saratoga, California.

Vaughn has been an opera and theater critic for twenty years, writing for San Jose’s Metro and the Tacoma News-Tribune. He’s The Montserrat Review’s fiction editor, an avid softball player, karaoke-phile, and rock drummer, and has spent many years painting houses as a day job. He currently alternates residencies between Tacoma, Washington and San Jose, California.