Douglas Light was born in Indiana. He is the author of the novel East Fifth Bliss, which received the Benjamin Franklin Award for Fiction. The screen adaptation of this novel, which he wrote with Michael Knowles, begins shooting in October 2009. It stars Michael C. Hall (Dexter). Light received a 2010 NoMAA Grant and his fiction has won an O. Henry Prize and has appeared in the Best American Nonrequired Reading anthology, Narrative, Guernica, Alaska Quarterly Review, Failbetter, and other magazines.