Campfires of the Dead and the Living is the collected stories of Peter Christopher. Broken into two sections, the book begins with The Living, an unpublished collection of stories that were written between 1990 and 2004. The second section, Campfires of the Dead, was originally published in 1989 by Alfred A. Knopf and has been out of print since the first printing.

Peter Christopher was an award-winning author and journalist. He was a writer-in-residence for the Writers Voice Workshop and a guest lecturer at Columbia University, New York University, University of Florida, and Portland State University's Haystack Program in the Arts. Peter curated a reading series for the New York Public Library and La Mama La Gallerica Second Classe. He joined the faculty of the Georgia Southern Writing and Linguistics Department in 1998, where he was instrumental in establishing and building the creative writing program. Peter inspired countless students, winning Georgia Southern University's Dorothy Smith Golden Award for Excellence in Teaching. He also was awarded a grant from the National Endowment for the Arts and First Place in Story's Naked Fiction Competition. Peter passed away in 2008 at the age of 52.