Keith Maillard was born in Wheeling, West Virginia, in 1942. From 1968 to 1970, he wrote and produced a weekly public affairs radio show called The Underground News for Boston University Radio. During the same period, he was also a writer and editor for the underground newspapers Broadside and the Free Press of Boston. He emigrated to Canada in 1970, and after a brief period in Alert Bay, he settled in Vancouver. In the 1970s, Maillard was a freelance broadcaster for the CBC, songwriter, arranger and bass player for the Ferron Band (the backing band for Vancouver folksinger Ferron), and he continued to write fiction. His published novels now include Two Strand River (1976), Alex Driving South (1980), The Knife in My Hands (1981), Cutting Through (1983), Motet (1989), and Light in the Company of Women (1993), Gloria (1999), and The Clarinet Polka (2002). The Knife in My Hands and Cutting Through were reworked into the Difficulty at the Beginning quartet published between 2005 and 2006. In 1994 Maillard published his first book of poetry: Dementia Americana. He has also written two feature film screenplays: an adaptation of the novel Two Strand River and Tiffany; both were optioned and were in development for production but were not completed. Tiffany was later reworked into a graphic novel script but has not yet been published. His work also includes a not yet published memoir, Fatherless.