Dean Paschal grew up in a small town in southwest Georgia called Albany. Upon sensing the twilight of his official childhood in the seventh grade, he began to read every children’s book he could get his hands on while they were still, by society’s regard, age-appropriate. He was an indiscriminate reader, though, so along with classics like Winnie the Pooh and Little Women, he digested lesser works like Black Beauty, which he chose as the subject for an English paper. His teacher scoffed at his pedestrian choice and asked if he couldn’t do better. At that challenge, young Dean marched to the library, scanned its shelves and found the thickest book it contained—at 872 pages, a single-volume edition of David Copperfield. He followed that with Edward Gibbon’s Decline and Fall and James Fennimore Cooper’s The Spy, and thus his literary life began. Paschal attended Duke University, where he studied electronic engineering and zoology, and later the Medical College of Georgia. He completed his medical residency at Charity Hospital, which is how he arrived in New Orleans. His specialties are internal medicine and tropical medicine, but he has always done emergency medicine. He likes to tell people he was an E.R. physician before George Clooney was. Paschal’s short stories have been collected in the book By the Light of the Jukebox and published widely in journals and anthologies, including the 2003 Best American Short Stories. 

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