David Adam Galef (born March 27, 1959) is an American fiction writer, critic, poet, translator, and essayist. Born in the Bronx, he grew up in Scarsdale. He graduated summa cum laude from Princeton University in 1981, after which he lived in Osaka, Japan, for a year. He received an M.A. in English from Columbia University in 1984, and a Ph.D. in literature in 1989. In 1992, he married Beth Weinhouse. From 1989 to 2008, he was a professor of English at the University of Mississippi in Oxford, where he administered the M.F.A. program in creative writing until 2007. David Galef and his family currently live in Montclair, where he is an English professor and director of the creative writing program at Montclair State University.