Patrick Keller grew up in Claremont, California. At UC Berkeley, he chose Psychology as a second major to accompany English, mistakenly assuming that it would be the secret weapon for writing novels. At UC Irvine, his grad school mentor gave him a Steve Katz book as a curio, mistakenly assuming that he wouldn't scrap his previous research plans and write his dissertation on this type of freewheeling mixture of autobiography and fiction. In 2010, after reading too many books and interviews with Raymond Federman and Ronald Sukenick, he created Pescetarealism, an attempt to extend their egalitarian ideals to something more about persistence than performance. He received his Ph.D in English for Subversively Personal: Surfiction As Communication in Vietnam War Era America in 2011. His scholarly article "Contemporary Surfiction: Wideman, Kaufman, and Maddin" appeared in the June 2014 issue of Word and Text. He teaches in Orange County and lives with his wife in Long Beach, California.