Robert Blair Osborn is a native of Seattle and grew up in the San Francisco Bay Area. He studied intensive Mandarin at Beijing University in the late 1980s. He lives in Sacramento with his wife and three children. Favorite authors include: Maxine Hong Kingston, Kazuo Ishiguro, Gail Tsukiyama, Ha Jin, Chang-Rae Lee, Yukio Mishima, William Faulkner, and Vladmir Nabokov.