Tom Drury is from the American Midwest. As a teenager he walked beans and worked at a grain elevator, though he doubts that people walk beans anymore, and the grain elevator is gone, as are the railroad tracks that brought the boxcars to the grain elevator.

He's written five novels, and his writing has appeared in The Paris Review, The New Yorker, A Public Space, Ploughshares, Granta, The Mississippi Review, Harper's Magazine, and Tricycle: The Buddhist Review. His work has been supported by the Guggenheim Foundation, the American Academy in Berlin, and MacDowell.

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From 2015 to 2019 he lived in Berlin, and his novels have been translated into Italian, German, Spanish, and French. His favorite places in Berlin are Laidak and the former airfield known as Tempelhofer Feld.

He's taught creative writing at the Iowa Writers' Workshop, Wesleyan University, Hollins University, the University of Leipzig, Bard College Berlin, and the Berlin Writers' Workshop, for which one of his classes met in the backroom of a cozy bar on Karl-Marx-Platz. He currently lives in Iowa City.