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David Shields is one of today's most controversial writers and also one of the most passionate. Jonathan Lethem says of Shields: “While on the one hand I feel the urge to compare Shields to the very most incisive and smart contemporary essayists I know—Phillip Lopate and Vivian Gornick and Geoff Dyer—in another sense he's accomplished something here so pure and wide in its implications that I almost think of it as a secular, unsentimental Kahlil Gibran: a textbook for the acceptance of our fate on earth.”

In addition to his new book, The Thing About Life Is That One Day You'll Be Dead, Shields is the author of eight previous books, including Black Planet: Facing Race During an NBA Season, a finalist for the National Book Critics Circle Award; Remote: Reflections on Life in the Shadow of Celebrity, winner of the PEN/Revson Award; and Dead Languages: A Novel, winner of the PEN Syndicated Fiction Award. His essays and stories have appeared in The New York Times Magazine, Harper's, Yale Review, Village Voice, Salon, Slate, McSweeney's, and Utne Reader; he's written reviews for The New York Times Book Review, Los Angeles Times Book Review, Boston Globe, and Philadelphia Inquirer.

Shields has received a Guggenheim Fellowship, two NEA Fellowships, an Ingram Merrill Foundation Award, a Ludwig Vogelstein Foundation grant, and a New York Foundation for the Arts Fellowship. He lives with his wife and daughter in Seattle, where he teaches at the University of Washington. Since 1996, he has also been a member of the faculty at Warren Wilson College's low-residency MFA program in Asheville, North Carolina. His work has been translated into French, Dutch, Norwegian, Japanese, and Farsi. He was the chair of the 2007 National Book Awards nonfiction panel.

We interviewed Mr. Shields on two occasions, and this printed version is a combination of those interviews. The first meeting was over lunch at the Palm Court Grill in Spokane, on May 19, 2006. We met again at Hsu's restaurant in downtown Atlanta, during AWP's annual conference, on March 1, 2007.