Peter Leach was born and grew up in St. Louis. He attended Amherst College, spent two years in the Cold War army in Germany, then studied playwriting at Yale Drama School. He has taught at Bryn Mawr College, the University of Louisville and currently teaches in the night-school at Washington University in St. Louis. His short story collection Tales of Resistance won the George Garrett Prize and was published by Texas Review Press in 1999. His work has appeared in Virginia Quarterly Review, Minnesota Review, Indiana Review, River Styx, Panache, Artful Doge, and Kansas Quarterly. One of his stories was reprinted in an O. Henry Awards and another in an NYU Press Best Little Magazine Fiction. His story The Convict's Tale won the Nebraska Review fiction prize. Leach received a National Endowment for the Arts creative writing fellowship.