Michael Kirshteyn was born in the Soviet Union in 1963. At the age of seven, he encountered the love of his young life when he discovered his first science fiction book. By the time he was sixteen, he began to write stories. When his parents emigrated to the United States, Kirshteyn continued his relationship with writing and enrolled in high school, from which he graduated in 1981. He has been an American citizen since the age of twenty-one.

Raised in Cincinnati and educated in public schools, he eventually found his way to the University of Cincinnati and, over the protests of the school administration, managed to annex a series of degrees in Mathematics, Computer Science and Computer Engineering, up to and including a Ph.D.

He infiltrated a series of companies and climbed the corporate ladder, ignoring all cries of outrage, until he found himself hitting the glass ceiling. He is married to Vlada Berman, a business analyst with whom he shares two children. The Kirshteyns live in Cincinnati, Ohio.

Biography provided by the author, November 2002.