I was born in Charleston, South Carolina, in 1963. My parents were Ovie Boutwell, the son of an illiterate sharecropper and moonshiner from Lower Alabama, and Dolores Hartshorn, the daughter of a Greyhound bus driver from Griffin, Georgia. I grew up in Orange City, Florida, a village outside DeLand, which is a town outside Daytona Beach. A graduate of the 1981 class of DeLand High School, I hold a Bachelor of Arts degree in English from Stetson University (1985), and a Master of Arts in Creative Writing from the University of North Texas (2012). Not bad for a man whose grandfather couldn't read. My wife and I currently reside in Denton, Texas, with our two cats. Denton is a college town and the home of Recycled Books, the best used bookstore I've seen since leaving DeLand.