Steve Bogira graduated from Northwestern University and has been a prize-winning writer for the Chicago Reader since 1981. In 1993 he was awarded an Alicia Patterson journalism fellowship, which allowed him to spend a year focusing on felony courts and the poor. His first book, Courtroom 302, published by Knopf in 2005, is the story of one year in Chicago's Cook County Criminal Courthouse, the largest felony courthouse in the nation. Courtroom 302 was a finalist for the Los Angeles Times book award and is being developed into an HBO mini-series. Bogira and his wife live in Evanston, Illinois.