Steven Popkes was born in 1952, in Santa Monica, California. His father was an aeronautical engineer. Consequently, Steve moved all over the country from California to Alabama, Seattle, Missouri, and, finally, Massachusetts. Generally, he regards himself as from Missouri, since that's where his family is from.

In the tradition of most writers, his day job has been what comes immediately to hand: house restorer to morgue tech to software engineer to white water rafting guide. Currently, he is involved in the avionics portion of the NASA Ares project.

He has had two novels published, Caliban Landing (Congdon and Weed, 1987) and Slow Lightning (Tor, 1991) and nearly thirty pieces of short fiction in such markets as Asimov's, Full Spectrum 2 (eds. Lou Aronica, Shawna McCarthy, Amy Stout, Pat LoBrutto), The Twilight Zone Magazine, Night Cry, Realms of Fantasy, and F&SF. Over the years, his stories have been collected in several year's best anthologies, including "The Egg" (Year's Best SF, 1989), "Fable for Savior and Reptile" (Year's Best Fantasy 3, 2003), "Winters Are Hard" (Year's Best SF, 2004), and "The Great Caruso" (Year's Best SF, 2005); his short story "The Color Winter" was a nominee for both the Theodore Sturgeon Memorial and Nebula Awards. He is a founding member of the Cambridge Science Fiction Workshop and was one of the contributors to CSFW's Future Boston (ed. David Alexander Smith).

Steven, his wife, son and cat breed turtles on two acres in Massachusetts.