Nath Pizzolatto was born and raised in Lake Charles, Louisiana, before attending Rice University in Houston, Texas, for his undergraduate education. He dropped out one year before graduation and pursued a career as a professional poker player from 2005-2012, remaining primarily based out of Houston but also spending time traveling and living in Austin, Texas; Las Vegas, Nevada; and Syracuse, New York. After the enforcement of the UIGEA made it prohibitively difficult to continue poker as a profession, he returned to school, graduating with a Bachelor of Arts in English and a focus on creative writing.
From 2013-16, he worked as a freelance writer for multiple corporate outlets and local publications, before making a move to Playa Del Carmen, Mexico to resume his poker career. After concluding he was no longer interested in the game professionally, he moved back to Houston, returning to freelance writing and beginning to perform standup comedy. For a time beginning in 2017, he worked at Khon’s Bar in Houston as a bartender, where he also produced Saturday night comedy shows twice monthly.
From 2017-2019 he wrote a regular New Orleans Saints column for The Bayou Brief.
In March 2018, he took a job on the production of season 3 of HBO’s True Detective, based out of Fayetteville, Arkansas, where he mostly worked in the accounting department.
In January 2019, he began work as a copywriter for TeeTurtle in Denver, Colorado, working as a Content Writer who specializes in game design. He moved into full-time game design in 2020 before losing his job in a restructure.
During his unemployment, he returned to playing poker, although he is once again employed as a technical writer. Besides poker, he continues to pursue standup comedy, songwriting, and other creative pursuits in his free time, as well as an assortment of other hobbies. He very much enjoys the change of scenery the mountains provide after thirty-seven years on the Gulf Coast.