Rick Shefchik was born in Duluth, Minn., in 1952 (in the same hospital as Bob Dylan, 11 years later.) He graduated from Duluth East High School in 1970 and attended Dartmouth College in Hanover, N.H., where he received a B.A. in English/Creative Writing. After working in public relations and as a full-time musician, he began his journalism career at the Duluth News Tribune in 1978. He moved to the St. Paul Pioneer Press in 1980 as a television critic, and became a feature writer and columnist in the 1990s, writing a weekly syndicated parenting column for the Knight Ridder Newswire. He lives in Stillwater, Minn., with his wife and two children.