Sam Weller familiarized himself with the words of Ray Bradbury even before he was born. During the infamous Chicago blizzard of January 1967, as drifting blankets of snow created white-out conditions in the Windy City, William Weller, Sam’s father, read Bradbury’s seminal classic The Illustrated Man aloud to his pregnant wife, Barbara. The baby, nine months in utero, turned and listened with keen interest…

Sam Weller is the authorized biographer of one of the most influential authors of the 20th Century - Ray Bradbury, the poet laureate of the Dark Fantastic; the gatekeeper to October Country; the man who immortalized Green Town, Illinois, the planet Mars, and a dark dystopia where books are banished forever. The Bradbury Chronicles: The Life of Ray Bradbury is the first-ever biography of Ray Bradbury, an intimate portrait of a creator and visionary who, more than any other author, altered the fabric of popular culture. The Bradbury Chronicles received the prestigious Society of Midland Authors award for best biography in 2005, and was short-listed for the Bram Stoker award in the best nonfiction category. The book was a Los Angeles Times bestseller and was named by several national publications, including the Chicago Tribune, the Denver Rocky Mountain News, and the Atlanta Journal-Constitution, as one of the best books of the year.

Sam Weller is the former Midwest Correspondent for Publishers Weekly. He is a regular feature writer for the Chicago Tribune Magazine, as well as the Chicago Public Radio program 848, and a former host of the Chicago Public Radio program Hello Beautiful! He is a frequent literary critic for the Chicago Tribune and the Chicago Sun-Times. He wrote about punk rock for Punk Planet magazine and his essays have appeared on the National Public Radio program All Things Considered. He is a contributor to Playboy.com and a former staff writer for the alt. weekly Newcity, where he was awarded the Peter Lisagor Award - the highest honor in Chicago journalism. His short fiction has been published in Spec-Lit, an anthology of science fiction edited by the noted SF author, Phyllis Eisenstein, as well as in Tales from the Dim Unknown, and the 2008 anthology Who Can Save Us Now?: Brand-New Superheroes and Their Amazing (Short) Stories published by Free Press.

Sam is a frequent and highly sought after lecturer on the life and works of Ray Bradbury, as well as on the writing process and getting published. In February 2004, he was the special guest of the Commonwealth Club in San Jose, California. He has participated in more than twenty National Endowment for the Arts Big Read programs, delivering speeches in Junuea, Alaska, Los Angeles, California, Savannah, Georgia, and all points in between.

Sam Weller is a professor in the Fiction Department at Columbia College Chicago. He lives in Chicago with his wife, baby daughters, and trusty dog. He is currently at work on a historical narrative nonfiction mystery and a collection of short stories, as well as editing an anthology of all-new modern pulp fiction.