W.T. Pfefferle was born in Winnipeg, and grew up in western Canada. He relocated to the U.S. in the late 1970s to study. He earned his MFA and PhD in the 1980s, and began a 35 year academic teaching career. He was the founding director of the Expository Writing Program at Johns Hopkins. He published five books, and more than a hundred poems, stories, photos, and articles in places like the Chronicle of Higher Education, Poets and Writers, Virginia Quarterly Review, Antioch Review, Carolina Quarterly, Ohio Review, North American Review, and elsewhere. He retired to Oregon in 2018 and left public life in 2020. He has been married to his college sweetheart for 38 years.