William Shunn was born in Los Angeles in 1967, the first of eight children in a devout Mormon family. His early interests included astronomy, geology, paleontology, and other natural sciences. At the age of six he won a Halloween short story contest in his first-grade class and decided he wanted to become a writer. His family moved from California to Utah, where in an English class Bill first encountered the story "Reason" by Isaac Asimov. That was the gateway drug. He was hooked on science fiction.

Bill graduated from high school in 1984 and began attending the University of Utah in Salt Lake City on a full academic scholarship. In 1985 he was accepted to the Clarion Workshop at Michigan State University, a summer program in science fiction and fantasy writing. There he studied under writers like Algis Budrys, Joe Haldeman, Michael Bishop, Kate Wilhelm, and Damon Knight. His fellow students included Geoffrey A. Landis, Martha Soukup, Robert A. Howe, and Kristine Kathryn Rusch.

In 1986, Bill was called to serve the LDS Church as a missionary in the Canadian province of Alberta. He entered the Missionary Training Center in September and three weeks later began his service as an ordained minister and door-to-door proselytizer. His experiences as a missionary did not proceed as planned, and culminated in his arrest and expulsion from Canada in March 1987. He completed his two-year term of service in Washington and Idaho.

In 1988, Bill resumed his studies at the University of Utah, graduating in 1991 with a B.S. in computer science and a minor in English. He went to work that fall for WordPerfect Corporation in Provo, Utah, where he helped program the 6.0 DOS version of the company's eponymous word processor. He and his colleagues worked almost exclusively in 80x86 assembly language.

Bill continued to write, with his first professional story, "From Our Point of View We Had Moved to the Left," appearing in the February 1993 issue of The Magazine of Fantasy & Science Fiction. Several more sales followed in rapid order. In 1995, he Bill pulled up stakes and moved to New York City. His faith in Mormonism unraveling, he created Mormon Matter, one of the earliest and most infamous ex-Mormon Web sites of its time. He posted the story of his arrest and expulsion from Canada in serial form under the title "Terror on Flight 789," and it became popular among devout and apostate readerships alike.

In 1997, Bill went to work as a technical producer for Rocktropolis.com, where he helped run some of the Web's earliest live concert broadcasts, including shows with the Cure, Mötley Crüe, and the Allman Brothers Band. He accepted a position the next year as a senior developer for the Children's Television Workshop (now Sesame Workshop), where he worked on the Sesame Street Web site. From 2002 until 2008, Bill was senior developer for BenefitsCheckUp.org, a service of the National Council on Aging that helps senior citizens find benefits programs that may be of help to them.

Ironically enough for a man formerly accused of terrorism, Bill created what may have been the first online "survivor registry" in the wake of the September 11th terrorist attacks. This was a site where those unable to connect with loved ones by phone could post messages saying they were all right. Bill was interviewed about the survivor registry by such media outlets as The New York Times, The Wall Street Journal, People, CNNfn, and BBC Television, and his work was profiled online at News.com, About.com, and FastCompany.com.

Bill has continued to write and sell science fiction stories, not to mention the odd essay or review, with his work appearing in publications ranging from Asimov's Science Fiction to Salon.com. In 2002, he was nominated for the Nebula Award for his novelette "Dance of the Yellow-Breasted Luddites." From 2003 to 2005, he served as a national judge for the Scholastic Art & Writing Awards, delivering the keynote address at its New York City region awards ceremony in 2004. In 2007, his novella "Inclination" was nominated for the Hugo, Nebula, and Theodore Sturgeon Memorial Awards.

A chapbook of Bill's stories, An Alternate History of the 21st Century, appeared from Spilt Milk Press in 2007, and his book Cast a Cold Eye, co-written with Derryl Murphy, will appear from PS Publishing late in 2009. Bill is currently working on a couple of different novel projects, as well as podcasting his memoir The Accidental Terrorist, a book-length expansion of "Terror on Flight 789."

On June 30, 2001, Bill married Laura Chavoen at the Graceland Wedding Chapel in Las Vegas, Nevada. Their wedding was featured on the Travel Channel series "Two for Las Vegas." Together with their soft-coated wheaten terrier Ella, the couple moved from New York City to Chicago in 2007, where Bill now writes full-time.