Keith R. A. Decandido
Author

International best-selling
author Keith R.A. DeCandido was born, raised, educated, and still
lives in the Bronx. His Mom and Dad fed him a steady diet of Robert A.
Heinlein, Ursula K. Le Guin, J.R.R. Tolkien, and P.G. Wodehouse, which
corrupted him for life -- not only instilling in him a great love of
science fiction, fantasy, and silly British humor, but also likely being
responsible for his pretentious insistence on using both his middle
initials all the time.
Keith has published over thirty
novels, most of them in the realm of media tie-ins. The majority of
his work has appeared in the worlds of Star Trek: Keith has written novels, novellas,
comic books, short stories, and eBooks, and also edited several anthologies
that cover all five TV shows as well as several prose-only series --
one of which, the Corps of Engineers eBook series, he co-developed. Several
of his Trek novels have hit the USA Today
best-seller list, and received critical acclaim from all over the map,
both online and in print, and Keith also continues to edit the monthly
Star Trek eBook line.
He has also written in the
worlds of Blizzard Games, Buffy the Vampire
Slayer,
Command and Conquer, CSI, Doctor Who, Farscape, Gene Roddenberry's
Andromeda, Marvel Comics, Supernatural, Young Hercules, and many more.
In 2004, Dragon Precinct, Keith's first non-tie-in novel, was
published. It's a police procedural in a standard elves/dwarves/magic
fantasy setting -- picture Law & Order meets Lord of the
Rings. Stories in the same setting have appeared in the anthologies
Murder by Magic, Hear Them Roar, Bad-Ass Faeries,
and Pandora's Closet.
Keith's editorial career started
in college -- serving on Fordham University's award-winning alternative
newspaper, called, simply, the paper -- and includes a stint
at Library Journal magazine and five years as an editor for the
late Byron Preiss and his various companies (Byron Preiss Visual Publications,
Byron Preiss Multimedia, BP Books, and ibooks inc.). Among his accomplishments
in the latter job were editing a highly successful line of novels based on
Marvel Comics's super heroes
and helping bring Alfred Bester back into print.
From 1998-2006, Keith owned
and operated the company Albé-Shiloh Inc., a provider of writing and editing
services. ASI's most visible project was the Nebula Award-nominated
anthology of original novelettes called Imaginings: An
Anthology of Long Short Fiction.
Keith has edited over a dozen anthologies since 1995, from the acclaimed OtherWere: Stories
of Transformation
in 1996 to the Star Trek anthologies Tales of the
Dominion War
and Tales
from the Captain's Table
in 2004-2005 to Doctor Who: Short
Trips: The Quality of Leadership
in 2008.
For four glorious years, Keith
worked on The Chronic Rift, a New York City public access talk
show on SF, fantasy, comics, gaming, and other genre issues. Working
with his best friend, Executive Producer and Director John S. Drew, Keith was cohost and Producer of
the Rift, doing 100 half-hour episodes that aired in New York
from 1990-1994.
Keith is a professional musician,
currently the percussionist for the parody band the Boogie Knights. He's played on five CDs. From 1996-2000, he was with the Don't
Quit Your Day Job Players, and besides his gigs with the Knights, he
has been occasionally active in New York City clubs, backing up the Randy Bandits, Steve Rosenhaus, and the late David Honigsberg.
Besides all this, Keith is
a student of Kenshikai
karate (an advanced
green belt, as of August 2007), and an amateur actor and voiceover actor
(you can hear his work on some of the audio dramas produced and directed
by his erstwhile Chronic Rift cohort John S. Drew).
<
p>Photo by Terri Osborne,
taken at Trinity College in Dublin, Ireland in August 2005. Copyright
© 2005 Terri
Osborne.
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