Richard Risemberg was born into a Jewish-Italian household in Argentina, and brought to Los Angeles to escape the fascist regime of his homeland. He has lived there since, except for a digression to Paris in the turbulent Eighties. He attended Pepperdine University on a scholarship won in a writing competition, but left in his last year to work in jobs from gritty to glitzy, starting at a motorcycle shop and progressing through offices, retail, an independent design and manufacturing business, and most recently a stint managing an adult literacy program at a library branch in one of the poorest neighborhoods of the city. All has become source material for his writing.

He has pursued journalism, photography, and editorial writing, which, combined with his years in motorcycle culture, introduced him to the darker side of the dream. His fiction concentrates on working-class life, homelessness, and cultures of violence, and the indifference of the Dominant Culture to it all.

Mr. Risemberg has published stories, poems, essays, editorials, and articles in edited publications including the Los Angeles Downtown News, the Los Angeles Business Journal, Momentum, and, on the literary side, Snowy Egret, Juxta, Terrain, Empty Mirror, Switchblade, Mystery Tribune, Ginosko Literary Journal, Scarlet Leaf Review, Front Porch Review, Ornery Quarterly, Fiction on the Web UK, American Writers Review, Bangalore Review, Short Edition, The Thieving Magpie, The Metaworker, 34th Parallel, Rumble Fish, Rock and a Hard Place, Potato Soup Journal, Lamplit Underground, r.kv.r.y., the Maple Tree Literary Supplement, Down & Out, Here Comes Everyone, and Modern Literature, with pieces currently slated to appear soon in North Dakota Review, Edify, Fear of Monkeys,  Wood Coin magazine, Adelaide Literary, Backchannels, and Mondays Are Murder by Akashic Books.