Charles Casillo was born in New York City. He has spent many years exploring and documenting his interests and obsessions—such as Marilyn Monroe, strange encounters in various Manhattan bars, unusually talented individuals, eccentrics, sex, tragic figures, and antidotes to insomnia, insecurity, and loneliness. His novel The Marilyn Diaries combines these themes. It is a fictitious recreation of the infamous lost diaries of Monroe and is written in her voice as he imagines it. He is also the author of the biography Outlaw: The Lives and Careers of John Rechy which tells the story of the legendary literary lion, provocateur, and sexual renegade. Casillo's profiles, short stories, articles, reviews, and poems have appeared in the New York Times, the Los Angeles Times, Christopher Street, The Lambda Book Report, The Washington Post, Frontiers, Men's Style, The Harvard Review and many others. He divides his time between New York and Los Angeles.