Gregory Coles is a tangle of identities: born in upstate New York, raised on the Indonesian island of Java, and now working as a freelance author and scholar in Idaho's Treasure Valley. He holds a PhD in English from Penn State and has been in love with language since age 8, when he started learning his older brother’s SAT vocabulary words and reading Shakespeare’s Hamlet.

Greg’s fiction and expository writing have been published by Penguin Random House and Houghton Mifflin Harcourt. His academic research on rhetorics of marginality (how language works in society for disadvantaged groups) has appeared in College English and Rhetorica and in an edited collection from Cambridge University Press. His two memoirs, Single, Gay, Christian and No Longer Strangers, have earned awards that include a Foreword INDIES Award Finalist and an InterVarsity Press Readers' Choice Award. His newest book, a novel exploring the power of language to shape human thought, is The Limits of My World.