Along the way, Keith has written about music and sports, medicine and culture. In 2002, he followed CBS news anchor Dan Rather as he chased the eye of a hurricane. In 2003, he chronicled the rise and fall of a French Quarter clown who overdosed in his Boston apartment. And in 2004, he wrote about gay marriages on Cape Cod, serial killer trials in Baton Rouge, and dog fighting in dusty pens in rural Louisiana. His stories have won numerous awards for both deadline news and feature writing.

Keith was born and raised in Cincinnati, Ohio, the oldest of three children in a home steeped in Irish tradition. He attended twelve years of Catholic schooling, then enrolled at Northwestern University in the fall of 1991. There, he worked at the Daily Northwestern and majored in American history, focusing on U.S. intervention in Asia in the twentieth century. After graduation in 1995, he moved to Japan, where he taught English, drank green tea, played baseball with middle-aged Japanese men on weekends, and traveled to China, Hong Kong, and Vietnam.

It was there that Keith first began writing, selling stories to Japanese magazines written for westerners living overseas. His grasp of the Japanese language and baseball skills have since faded. As it was, he could never hit a curveball or hit for the power his Japanese teammates always expected of him. But he remains active today, still traveling, playing softball and training for the 2006 Boston Marathon.

He lives with his girlfriend, a small dog, and a three-legged cat.