Born in central New England in the summer of 1974, Keith C. McCormic lived in Texas, Oklahoma, and Vermont before returning to his mother's ancestral home, the Pioneer Valley. Living in Florence, Keith spent many hours at the Lilly Library reading about a wide variety of topics, including politics and science fiction. Before graduating from Northampton High School in 1992, he was active in Civil Air Patrol. Keith was also an avid Boy Scout, spending every summer at the Chesterfield Scout Reservation and serving as an assistant scoutmaster after he reached adulthood.

After high school, Keith attended the University of Massachusetts in Amherst as a part-time student so that he could work. He served many years as the assistant manager for the Amherst Drop Zone Army-Navy Store, outfitting police officers, National Guardsmen, and local sports enthusiasts. He also led the marketing office at  the UMass University Store, reversing a trend of declining sales in the face of new competition. In 2000, Keith earned a Bachelor of Arts in Anthropology with a concentration in traditional skills.

In 2002, Keith C. McCormic joined the New England Adolescent Research Institute (NEARI), a charitable special education school in Holyoke. NEARI uses state of the art neurodevelopmental therapies and relationship-based education and treatment to foster self-awareness, personal responsibility, maturity, and lifelong success in academically, socially, emotionally, and behaviorally at-risk youth.

Today, Keith administers NEARI's technology infrastructure and teaches important skills to disadvantaged young people. He sees the dreadful toll that today's children suffer at the hands of poverty, gang violence, and drugs. Keith faces the brutal realities of government entitlement programs, educational interference, and unfunded mandates every day. Each morning, he sees the failures of bureaucrats and elected officials written upon the faces of his students, students who are sadly older than their years.