Darren was born and raised in New York, and received a bachelor’s degree in government from Georgetown University in Washington, D.C. In 1994, he moved to Texas to pursue a graduate degree at the University of Texas at Austin, with every intention of heading back east within two years. More than twenty-five years later he’s still in Austin, where he lives with his wife Jessica and their two retrievers, Shea and Polo, and concedes that he's now lived in Austin long enough to have turned into one of those people he couldn't stand (and who couldn't stand him) when he first moved there.