About Mark

Born in the Four Corners region of New Mexico, Mark Coggins is an enrolled member of the Choctaw Nation. He earned two degrees and a Phi Beta Kappa Key from Stanford University and has worked for a number of Silicon Valley computer and venture capital firms, including Netscape Communications and Hewlett Packard Company.

While at Stanford, he studied literature and creative writing with Tobias Wolff, N. Scott Momaday and Ron Hansen and wrote the first story featuring his series character August Riordan in a class taught by Hansen. This story, “There’s No Such Thing as Private Eyes,” was later published in The New Black Mask, vol. 4, Harcourt, Brace Jovanovich.

His books have been nominated for the Shamus and the Barry crime fiction awards and have been selected for best of the year lists compiled by the San Francisco Chronicle, the Detroit Free Press and Amazon.com, among others.

Runoff and The Big Wake-Up won the Next Generation Indie Book Award and the Independent Publisher Book Award (IPPY) respectively, both in the crime fiction category. The Immortal Game was optioned for a film.

Coggins has published short fiction in Ellery Queen’s Mystery Magazine and the anthology Masters of Technique, as well as nonfiction in View Camera and Distributed Object Computing magazines.

He is also a photographer. He works with a range of subjects, but focuses on candid, black and white images taken in public—aka “street photography.” He has won numerous awards and competitions, including being shortlisted in the 2023 Photo Review Competition, receiving an award of excellence by the All-Japan Association of Photographic Societies and winning first place in the 2023 Ribbet Emerging Photographer Competition.

His work has been exhibited in galleries and museums across the United States and Europe and has been featured in a variety of on-line and print publications, including cover images for both fiction and nonfiction books. His own photography monograph, Street Stories, was published by Poltroon Press in 2021.

A complete photography CV is available here. An author photo is available here.