Habeeb, William Mark: - William Mark Habeeb was born and raised in Alabama, the son of a Lebanese immigrant father and a Cuban-American mother. He earned degrees in international relations at Georgetown and Johns Hopkins universities, read literature and philosophy at the University of Sussex and studied psychoanalytic theory with the Washington Center for Psychoanalysis. He teaches in Georgetown University's School of Foreign Service and lives in Virginia. He is a member of the board of Virginia Humanities, the state's humanities council. Habeeb has published over a dozen non-fiction books for scholarly, general public and young adult audiences. His short fiction has appeared in the Berkeley Fiction Review and Broken Pencil. Venice Beach is his first novel.