David G. Dodd

"I'm a librarian by profession, working right now as the City Librarian for San Rafael, California. I've worked previously for the San Francisco Public Library, the Marin County Free Library, Santa Cruz City and County Library, the library of the University of Colorado at Colorado Springs, the Benicia (Calif.) Public Library, and the Alameda County Library. Through my work in libraries, I have become pretty good at doing reference and research work, and that's the element that shows up in The Complete Annotated Grateful Dead Lyrics.

I was born and raised in the Bay Area, in Livermore, California. I am the youngest of four children. I studied German Literature at the University of California, Davis, after spending a year in Bremen, Germany, as a foreign exchange student. At Davis, I worked on the staff of the campus daily newspaper, the Cal Aggie, and learned to write to a deadline--a good skill.

After I graduated, I spent several years as a volunteer community organizer in low-income communities throughout California. I landed a job as a reference library assistant for Alameda County Library, taking books to inmates of the county's jails and prisons.

Since I started my work in libraries, I have kept up my interest in writing, doing a lot of book reviewing, and taking a year off to write a novel (as yet unpublished) about my years of experience as an organizer.

I'm married to Diana Spaulding, also a librarian, whom I met in library school at Berkeley. She co-edited The Grateful Dead Reader (Oxford Univ. Press, 2000) with me, though she is not a Deadhead. We have two children and we live in Petaluma, California.

I'm a Unitarian Universalist, and Diana and I were among the founders of a new UU congregation in Petaluma. I am the church pianist, and have served on the Board of Trustees.

Life is extremely full and rich. I can't wait to see what happens next, to quote a line from one of my favorite movies, ""Dead Again."""