Bruce Brooks was born in Washington, D.C., the setting for both Midnight Hour Encores and No Kidding, and divided his childhood years between that city and North Carolina, the setting for his first novel The Moves Make the Man. Like a number of his teen-age protagonists, Brooks grew up in a house split by divorce and with an alcoholic, unstable mother. At twelve he ran away from home in North Carolina and went to live with his grandmother in Washington, D.C. A self-described "half-outsider," never fully at home in either location, he grew up on the street, unusually independent, making his own decisions from an early age.

Brooks went to college at the University of North Carolina in Chapel Hill, lived for a time on Martha's Vineyard, Massachusetts, and is a graduate of the prestigious University of Iowa Writers' Workshop. He has...