Porter Shreve (born Washington, DC) is an American author and professor of English and Creative Writing.
He graduated from American University, and from the University of Michigan Creative Writing MFA Program in 1998, where he studied with Charles Baxter and Lorrie Moore. He has taught at several American universities, including the University of Michigan, the University of Oregon, the University of North Carolina at Greensboro, Purdue University, and the University of San Francisco.
On June 1, 2002, he married the memoirist and fiction writer Bich Minh Nguyen, author of Stealing Buddha's Dinner, Short Girls, and Pioneer Girl. They live in San Francisco, California.
Shreve's first novel, The Obituary Writer, about a young journalist in 1989 St. Louis who gets in over his head when a young widow asks him to pursue her story, was a 2000 New York Times Notable Book, a Book Sense Pick, and a Borders Original Voices selection. The New York Times called the novel "an involving and sneakily touching story whose twists feel less like the conventions of a genre than the convolutions of a heart—any heart." Shreve's second novel, Drives Like a Dream, about an empty nest mother in Detroit who hatches a scheme to lure her far-flung children home, was a 2005 Chicago Tribune Book of the Year, a People "Great Reads" Selection and a Britannica Book of the Year. The Washington Post called Drives Like a Dream “a beautiful novel, carefully put together, full of charming secondary characters, charitable to all.”