Will Boast was born in England and grew up in Ireland and Wisconsin. His short story collection, Power Ballads, won the 2011 Iowa Short Fiction Award and was a finalist for a California Book Award. He is the author of Epilogue, a memoir (2014).

His fiction and essays have appeared in Best New American Voices and the New York Times, among other publications. He has been a Stegner Fellow in fiction at Stanford University and a Charles Pick Fellow at the University of East Anglia in the UK.