Collier grew up outside New York City where he spent summers working at Manhattan-based Collier Associates, a family-run literary agency. He attended Denison University in Ohio where he majored in Philosophy and Psychology. He spent six years in Chicago and three years in Boston before a five-year stint down South in the small Southern Appalachian town of Lookout Mountain, Georgia (on the outskirts of Chattanooga, TN). He presently lives with his wife and two daughters in the bucolic New England town of Avon, Connecticut.