Dave Eggers grew up close to Chicago, and attended the University of  Illinois. He is the author of A Heartbreaking Work of Staggering Genius, You Shall Know Our Velocity!, and How We Are Hungry. In 1998, he founded McSweeney's, an independent publishing house now located in San Francisco; it publishes books, a quarterly literary journal also called McSweeney’s; the Believer, a monthly magazine of essays and interviews; Wholphin, a short-film DVD quarterly; and a daily humor website. In 2002, Eggers opened 826 Valencia, a writing lab for young people located in San Francisco’s Mission District. There, he continues to teach writing to high-school students, and runs a summer publishing camp. 826 Valencia satellite chapters have opened in Brooklyn, Ann Arbor, Los Angeles, Seattle, and Chicago. Each year, with the help of his workshop students, Eggers edits The Best American Nonrequired Reading, a collection of fiction, essays, and journalism. A staunch advocate of teachers, Eggers instituted a monthly grant for exceptional Bay Area teachers, and in 2005 co-wrote Teachers Have It Easy: The Big Sacrifices and Small Salaries of America’s Teachers.

His fiction has appeared in Zoetrope, Punk Planet, and The New Yorker; he’s written a serial novel about electoral politics for Salon.com and weekly short-short stories for the UK Guardian. Eggers has contributed introductions to new editions of work by Donald  Barthelme, John Cheever, and Mark Twain. Currently, he’s working on  a book based on the life of Valentino Achak Deng, a refugee from the  Sudan now living in Atlanta.

In 2004, while teaching at the UC Berkeley Graduate School of Journalism, Eggers co-founded Voice of Witness, a series of books that use oral history to illuminate human rights crises around the world. The first book in the series, Surviving Justice: America’s Wrongfully Convicted and Exonerated, was published in 2005. The second book in the series will feature oral histories from survivors of Hurricane Katrina. The third will cover slavery in southern Sudan.

Eggers’s design work has been featured in Print, Eye, and many other periodicals, and in annuals including Area: 100 Graphic Designers (Phaidon, 2003) and Reinventing the Wheel (2002, Princeton Architectural Press). In 2003, his book designs for McSweeney's were featured in the National Design Triennial at the Cooper-Hewitt  National Design Museum, and in the California Design Biennial.

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Books
Editor, Best American Nonrequired Reading 2006 (Houghton-Mifflin 2006) (Forthcoming)

Author, What is the What? (McSweeney's 2006)

Contributor, John Currin: The Complete Works (Rizzoli 2006)

Contributor, Masters of American Comics, John Carlin, Paul Karasik and Brian Walker, editors (Yale University Press 2005)

Co-Editor, Surviving Justice: America's Wrongfully Convicted and Exonerated (McSweeney's 2005)

Editor, Best American Nonrequired Reading 2005 (Houghton-Mifflin 2005)

Co-Author, Teachers Have It Easy: The Big Sacrifices and Small  Salaries of America's Teachers, with Daniel Moulthrop and Ninive Clements Calegari (New Press 2005)

Introduction, Fahrenheit 451 by Ray Bradbury (Modern Library 2005)

Introduction, Forty Stories by Donald Barthelme (Penguin Classics 2005)

Editor, The Best American Nonrequired Reading 2004 (Houghton-Mifflin 2004)

Introduction, When We Were Very Maakies by Tony Millionaire (Fantagraphics Books 2004)

Contributor, Yours in Food, John Baldessari, editor (Princeton Architectural Press 2004)

Co-Editor, The Future Dictionary of America (McSweeney's 2004)

Author, How We Are Hungry [short stories] (McSweeney's 2004)

Created in Darkness by Troubled Americans: The Best of McSweeney's Humor Category, co-editor (Knopf 2004)

Author, The Unforbidden Is Compulsory; or, Optimism [novella]  (McSweeney's 2004)

Introduction, A Tramp Abroad by Mark Twain (Modern Library 2003)

Introduction, The Tenants of Moonbloom by Edward Lewis Wallant ( New York Review of Books Classics 2003)

Co-Researcher, Giraffes? Giraffes! (McSweeney’s, 2003)

Editor, The Best American Nonrequired Reading 2003 (Houghton-Mifflin 2003)

Sacrament [a version of You Shall Know Our Velocity!] (McSweeney's 2003)

McSweeney's Mammoth Treasury of Thrilling Tales, contributor (McSweeney's/Vintage 2003)

Co-Author, Jokes Told in Heaven About Babies (McSweeney's 2003)

Contributor, The Kindness of Strangers (Lonely Planet 2003)

Author, You Shall Know Our Velocity! (McSweeney's 2002)

The Best American Nonrequired Reading 2002, editor (Houghton-Mifflin 2002)

Introduction, The Onion Ad Nauseam, (Boxtree 2002)

Contributor, Speaking with the Angel (Riverhead Books 2001)

Contributor, Best American Travel Writing 2000 (Houghton-Mifflin 2000)

Author, A Heartbreaking Work of Staggering Genius (Simon & Schuster 2000)

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Awards
National Magazine Award for Fiction finalist, 2004, "The Only Meaning of the Oil-Wet Water" (Zoetrope: All-Story, Summer 2003)

Independent Book Award, 2003, You Shall Know Our Velocity!

Pulitzer Prize finalist, 2001, A Heartbreaking Work of Staggering Genius

Addison Metcalfe Award, 2001, by the American Academy of Arts and  Letters

New York Times Book Review Editors' Choice, 2000, A Heartbreaking Work of Staggering Genius

Los Angeles Times, San Francisco Chronicle, Washington Post, and Time  Best Book of the Year, 2000, A Heartbreaking Work of Staggering Genius