Tom Barbash grew up on the Upper West Side of Manhattan and attended Haverford College. He is the author of the novels The Dakota Winters (HarperCollins, 2018) and The Last Good Chance; the story collection Stay Up with Me; and the bestselling essay collection On Top of the World: Cantor Fitzgerald, Howard Lutnick, and 9/11. A former Wallace Stegner Fellow at Stanford, Barbash is an associate professor in the MFA program at California College of the Arts in San Francisco.