LANGDON COOK has spent his entire adult life as a professional writer and editor. He worked as a reporter for the San Francisco Bay Guardian and the Berkeley Voice before relocating to Seattle to pursue his MFA in fiction writing at the University of Washington, where he studied under renowned authors David Shields and Laura Kalpakian. He moved to the embryonic Web in the late 1990s, first with Microsoft's MSN and subsequently as a senior book editor at Amazon.com. He left Amazon in 2004 to live with his wife and son in an off-grid cabin. He has worked as a freelance magazine writer and editor for magazines such as Conservation Magazine in recent years.

Outside Magazine, Gray's Sporting Journal, Fly Fisherman, The Stranger, and other publications have published his work. Lang graduated from Middlebury College in Vermont with a B.A., cum laude. At the University of Washington, he received the Joyce Waddell Writing Award, the Margery Boyden Wilderness Writing Residence, and a grant to attend the Bread Loaf Writers' Conference. In 2009, Seattle Weekly recognized Langdon's blog Fat-Of-The-Land the Best Local Eats Blog.