Matthew Lickona was born in 1973, the second son of a developmental psychologist and a sometime caterer. Raised in Cortland, a city in upstate New York, he enjoyed a happy childhood (marred only slightly in adolescence by an alarming, curly mullet). Afterward, he attended Thomas Aquinas College in Santa Paula, California.

Santa Paula is situated somewhere between Los Angeles and San Francisco, and in order to pay for the speeding tickets he acquired on the way to and from those cities, he published and sold a ‘zine entitled The Hype. This allowed him to write parodies of J. Peterman ads and publish cartoons that had been rejected by The New Yorker. (It would be several years before he gave the magazine a chance to reject one of his short stories, but they were ready for him when he did. The cartoons eventually found a home; the fiction remains crouched on his hard drive, waiting for an editor to show signs of weakness.)

Upon graduation in 1995, he began writing for The San Diego Reader, a weekly newspaper with a remarkable interest in long-form journalism. (“Nine thousand words on a single gal preparing and hosting a dinner party for her friends? Great.”) Since 1999, he has written an interview-driven weekly column on wine and the wine industry. Contrary to what some people seem to think, this is different from drinking for a living.

In 1996, he married Deirdre Scholl, a fellow Thomas Aquinas grad who also writes for the Reader. They live in La Mesa, California with their five children.