Jeffrey Scott VanderMeer was born July 7, 1968 in Belfont PA, and grew up in the Fiji Islands (where his parents worked for the Peace Corps), Ithaca NY, and Gainesville FL, where he attended the University of Florida for three years. He went to Clarion in 1992. VanderMeer’s first story of genre interest was “Night Prayers”, appearing when he was in high school in 1986; early work also appeared in