The Author, Dave Eggers

Zeitoun, Book Club Choice

Dave Eggers is the author of six previous books, including his most recent, Zeitoun, a nonfiction account a Syrian-American immigrant and his extraordinary experience during Hurricane Katrina and What Is the What, a finalist for the 2006 National Book Critics Circle Award. That book, about Valentino Achak Deng, a survivor of the civil war in southern Sudan, gave birth to the Valentino Achak Deng Foundation, run by Mr. Deng and dedicated to building secondary schools in southern Sudan.

Eggers is the founder and editor of McSweeney’s, an independent publishing house based in San Francisco that produces a quarterly journal, a monthly magazine (The Believer), and Wholphin, a quarterly DVD of short films and documentaries. In 2002, with Nínive Calegari he co-founded 826 Valencia, a nonprofit writing and tutoring center for youth in the Mission District of San Francisco. Local communities have since opened sister 826 centers in Chicago, Los Angeles, Brooklyn, Ann Arbor, Seattle, and Boston.

In 2004, Eggers taught at the University of California-Berkeley Graduate School of Journalism, and there, with Dr. Lola Vollen, he co-founded Voice of Witness, a series of books using oral history to illuminate human rights crises around the world. A native of Chicago, Eggers graduated from the University of Illinois with a degree in journalism. He now lives in the San Francisco Bay Area with his wife and two children.
source: www.mcsweeneys.net

Literary Awards

• National Magazine Award for Fiction finalist, 2004, “The Only Meaning of the Oil-Wet Water” (Zoetrope: All-Story, Summer 2003)
• Independent Book Award, 2003, You Shall Know Our Velocity!
• Pulitzer Prize finalist, 2001, A Heartbreaking Work of Staggering Genius
• Addison Metcalfe Award, 2001, by the American Academy of Arts and Letters
• New York Times Book Review Editors’ Choice, 2000, A Heartbreaking Work of Staggering Genius
• Los Angeles Times, San Francisco Chronicle, Washington Post, andTime Best Book of the Year, 2000, A Heartbreaking Work of Staggering Genius. 

source: www.mcsweeneys.net