John Whittier Treat was born and raised in New England, but has lived in the Pacific Northwest for over four decades. Now an emeritus professor at Yale, his novel The Rise and Fall of the Yellow House (2015) a novel of the early years of the AIDS pandemic, was a finalist for the Lambda Literary Prize for Gay Fiction. He is the recipient of the Christopher Hewitt Prize in, and his work has been nominated for a Pushcart Prize. A stutterer himself, Treat's new novel, First Consonants, is the story of a family of stutterers set in the Alaskan outback and was published was 2022. His work-in-progress, The Seventh City of Refuge, is the story of two young gay men, one HIV+ and the other a struggling meth addict, who leave Los Angeles for rural Washington State and are caught up in the local survivalist subculture.