Steven Greffenius was born in Minneapolis, Minnesota, in 1954. He grew up in Valley City, North Dakota, went to high school in Des Moines, Iowa, and received his undergraduate training at Reed College in Portland, Oregon. Since then he has served as a naval officer in the Western Pacific and Indian Oceans, helped start two successful businesses, lived in East Asia for five years, went to graduate school for five and a half years, taught politics in Wisconsin and China, and wrote a couple of books ¾ The Logic of Conflict: Making War and Peace in the Middle East and The Last Jeffersonian: Ronald Reagan's Dreams of America.

Currently Steven works as a writer in Westwood, Massachusetts, a little over twenty miles from Boston. He and his wife Leslie have a son born in 1982 and a daughter born in 1998.