David Shields

David Shields was born in Los Angeles in 1956 to a lower-middle class Jewish family. Shields's parents, both journalists, moved the family to San Francisco in 1962, where they were deeply involved in the anti-war and civil-rights movements. In 1978, Shields graduated from Brown University with a Bachelor of Arts, magna cum laude, Phi Beta Kappa, with Honors in British and American Literature. In 1980, he received a Master of Fine Arts, Honors in Fiction, from the Iowa Writers' Workshop. After starting his career as a fiction writer, publishing three novels between 1984 and 1992, Shields's focus shifted to nonfiction and literary collage. His book Reality Hunger: A Manifesto (2010), noted by David Griffith in Bookslut as a "bible for the next generation of culture-makers," was recently named one of the past decade's 100 most important books by LitHub. In 2015, Shields co-wrote I Think You're Totally Wrong: A Quarrel with Caleb Powell. Shields and Powell co-wrote and co-star in James Franco's adaptation of the book into a film of the same name, which was released in 2017 by Fresh Pond Entertainment. Shields wrote, produced, and directed Lynch: A History, a 2019 documentary about Marshawn Lynch's use of silence, echo, and mimicry as key tools of resistance. Lynch was named by Sight & Sound as one of the five best films at the 2019 International Documentary Film Festival of Amsterdam and will be streaming this summer and fall on Sundance TV/AMC and First Look Media. Both films are available on a variety of TVOD platforms: Amazon Prime, iTunes/Apple TV, Vudu, Vimeo, Google Play, and Kanopy.