Lance Pototschnik grew up in rural Frederick County, Maryland, in a house surrounded by farms. The last of his parents' eight children, he was born with severe allergies and a debilitating skin disorder, which often confined him to the house, where he busied himself by drawing and painting. As a sick child born at the back of a large family, life positioned Pototschnik as an observer, and he learned to capitalize on that station through writing. With The Shell of a Person, Pototschnik establishes himself as a master memoirist who achieves poignancy in his writing through a mixture of anguish and gut-busting humor. He hand-paints the covers of all his books. Today, he lives in China, where he writes and teaches English at a university in Beijing.
