People like Frederick Reiken

Frederick Reiken (born 1966) is an American author from Livingston, New Jersey He has published three novels to critical acclaim, and he teaches creative writing at Emerson College.

Reiken was born in New Jersey in 1966, and he attended the Pingry School. He earned a B.A. in Biology at Princeton University in 1988, where for his senior thesis he researched the behavioral ecology of island feral horses. He earned an M.F.A. at the University of California, Irvine, in 1992.

Reiken is married and has two daughters.

Reiken began thinking of himself as a writer after a poetry class at Princeton with J. D. McClatchy. In addition, Paul Auster's introductory fiction course and John McPhee's "Literature of Fact" course encouraged him to follow both his passions, science and writing. Following graduation in 1988, he went to the Negev desert as a wildlife biology researcher studying the population dynamics of Persian onagers, a species of wild ass.