Jeff MacGregor is currently a writer-at-large for Smithsonian Magazine. He has written often for The New York Times, Sports Illustrated, The New Yorker, ESPN, Esquire, Men's Journal, Details and Los Angeles magazine, among many others. His fiction has appeared in Story, Esquire and The Land-Grant College Review. His prizewinning work has been widely collected and anthologized, appearing in Sports Illustrated's 50 Years of Great Writing and Sports Illustrated: The Anniversary Book, and is reprinted frequently in the Best American Sports Writing series. He is at work on a novel, and a collection of poems.

MacGregor was born in Evanston, Illinois, and grew up all over the place. An only child, his earliest ideas about America were formulated from the window of a moving car. America is a colorful blur to him; and a cooler full of his mother's egg-salad sandwiches.

His patchwork education includes undergraduate and graduate programs at the University of Minnesota, the Ohio State University and Yale University. He is two credits away, generally in dance, or the history of theater, from every degree he ever sought. Thus, he holds no advanced degrees, but has a high school diploma, of which he is still proud, although it's packed away somewhere. He has taught both fiction and non-fiction writing at Yale University. Go figure.

He has lived and worked everywhere from New York to Los Angeles, and has done many things, most of which he chooses to keep to himself. He has been earning his living as a writer since 1993.