Bob Shacochis was born in Pennsylvania in 1951 and grew up in Virginia. He lived for three years in the Caribbean and now resides in Florida. His first collection of stories, Easy in the Islands, won the American Book Award in 1985, and his second collection, The Next New World, was awarded the Prix de Rome from the American Academy of Arts and Letters in 1989. He has also received a James Michener Fellowship and a grant from the NEA. He received a Bachelor of Journalism and an M.A. in English from the University of Missouri and an M.F.A. from the Iowa Writers' Workshop. Bob Shacochis is a columnist for Gentleman's Quarterly and a contributing editor for both Outside and Harper's. A collection of his columns, Domesticity, will be published by Scribners in February 1994. Swimming in the Volcano, the first book in a projected trilogy, is his first novel. [extracted from 1993 brochure]