A 2020 PEN America Emerging Voices Fellow, Damien Belliveau is a native of the San Francisco Bay Area and a veteran of the United States Army. He spent 15 years telling stories in the world of reality television as an editor, director, and producer on shows such as The Real World, Keeping Up with the Kardashians, Ball in the Family, and many more before joining USC’s Creative Writing and Literature PhD program on the fiction track. He is currently focused on completing a collection of short stories inspired by his time serving as an Army medic during the mid-1990s.