A producer, writer, director and award-winning novelist, he is the author of the collection 'Between Here and the Yellow Sea' and the novel 'Galveston.' He is originally from Southwest Louisiana, and taught literature at several universities, including the University of Chicago, before going into screenwriting in 2010. His fiction has been translated into French, German, Spanish, Japanese, Italian, and 26 other languages. He is best known as the creator of HBO's "True Detective", for which he was showrunner, producer, sometime director and almost entirely sole writer for its three original seasons. As of December 2024, he directed his first feature from his original script, "Easy's Waltz", starring Vince Vaughn and Al Pacino, and he is in preproduction on an original series for Netflix, while writing a number of films for Skydance Entertainment.