Tim Shorrock is an independent journalist who has been writing about corporate globalization, labor, and U.S. foreign policy for more than 25 years. He grew up in Japan and South Korea during the height of the Cold War, and he returned to the United States in 1969. After attending Earlham College—a Quaker school in Richmond, Indiana—he worked in a succession of blue-collar jobs before going back to school, in Asian Studies, at the University of Oregon, where he received a master's degree in 1980. Since then, he has worked as a journalist and a corporate researcher for labor unions. During the 1990s, he was a correspondent in the Washington bureau of the Journal of Commerce, a daily transportation newspaper published first by Knight-Ridder and later by The Economist. At the Journal of Commerce he covered the global maritime industry, international trade, and Congress. Shorrock's articles have appeared in many publications at home and abroad, including Salon, The Progressive, The Nation, Mother Jones, and Harper's Weekly. He now lives in Memphis, Tennessee, with his wife, Kathy McGregor, a nurse, storyteller and union organizer.

Shorrock got interested in writing about Hurricane Katrina after his wife volunteered at the Common Ground free clinic in New Orleans in the weeks after the storm. He spent several weeks in New Orleans in October 2005 and January 2006 to write about Common Ground, and has returned to the Big Easy and Mississippi's Gulf Coast many times since. Shorrock has a daughter, Roxanne, who is a student at the University of Maryland.