Hailing from a small rural town, Andrew Johnston spent most of his life in Kansas, graduating from the University of Kansas with a Political Science degree in 2008. In his youth, he wrote for a number of websites, including a mid-sized political site called Political Strategy and a perpetually-in-progress browser-based game called Tenadia. After college, he worked as an ESL teacher in the People's Republic of China, which would later inspire his first book Kingdom of Sharks.