David Beers was born in 1957 in San Diego, California, where his father
was stationed as a Navy pilot. He is the son of Harold S. "Hal" Beers,
Jr. and Therese Ann "Terry" Beers. His three siblings, all younger, are
Marybeth, Daniel and Maggie.
Until age three, his family
lived near Cincinnati, Ohio, where Hal worked as a test engineer for General
Electric's jet engine plant. Hal was hired by Lockheed Missiles and Space
Division as a satellite test engineer in 1960, prompting a permanent move
to San Jose, California. Their neighborhood borders Cupertino and Santa
Clara, and is a five minute drive from Apple headquarters.
David attended local Catholic
schools from grades 2 through 12, and enrolled in the Jesuit-run Santa
Clara University in 1975, graduating in 1979 with a Bachelor's degree
in English. At SCU he met his future wife, Deirdre Kelly.
After graduation, through
a Catholic agency, he taught in inner-city San Francisco schools for one
year, then made a living for the next few years as a free lance photographer,
graphic designer, public relations writer, and journalist.
In the early 1980s he was
published in the San Jose Mercury News, The San Francisco Examiner,
and other papers, his first-hand coverage ranging from Silicon Valley
workplace trends to the plight of Guatemala's Maya refugees to the U.S.
invasion of Grenada.
In 1984, he became an Associate
Editor at Pacific News Service in San Francisco, where his duties included
reporting, assigning and editing wire copy for newspapers. He considers
PNS Executive Editor Sandy Close, a recent recipient of the MacArthur
"Genius" Grant, a key mentor.
From 1987 to 1988 he was Senior
Editor and then managing editor of Image, as the Sunday magazine
of the San Francisco Examiner was then called.
From 1988 to 1991 he was senior
editor at Mother Jones magazine in San Francisco. He has written
free lance for various magazines since that time.
Over the years his pieces
have appeared in The Nation, The Progressive, In These Times, Mother
Jones, Vogue, Working Woman, California, The Los Angeles Times Magazine,
Harper's, The New York Times Magazine, and many newspapers.
"The Crash of Blue Sky California,"
the Harper's essay that was the genesis of Blue Sky Dream,
received a National Magazine Award for best essay in 1993.
"We're No Angels," his essay
about Vancouver, British Columbia, as a post-modern fantasy city, was
a Canadian National Magazine Award finalist in 1994.
He lives in downtown Vancouver
with Deirdre, who is a professor of education at the University of British
Columbia. They have a daughter, Nora, born on the summer solstice in 1995.
