Russell W. Johnson is originally from West Virginia, spent his middle and high school years in Pennsylvania, and currently lives in North Carolina, where he is a practicing attorney and fiction writer.

Russell holds an undergraduate degree in English and history, with a minor in creative writing, from West Virginia University and a juris doctorate from the University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill.

(Seriously, he really holds them. He gets those diplomas down off the wall at least once a day and struts around, shoving them in people’s faces, saying, “How you like me now, suckas?”