Dave Riese grew up in Massachusetts and attended Bates College in Maine, majoring in English literature. During his junior year, he studied at Oxford University. After serving in the Air Force during the Vietnam War, Riese worked at several Boston area companies in computer programming for forty years. Upon retirement in 2012, he had a long talk with himself: “If you want to publish a book, you’d better take writing seriously.” He subsequently wrote Echo from Mount Royal, a novel about a young woman’s strange courtship in 1951 Montreal. He and his wife live north of Boston.