Robert Kahn has worked as a musician, schoolteacher, legal worker in U.S. immigration prisons, track coach, freelance writer, and newspaper reporter and editor. He studied the saxophone with Joe Allard at the Manhattan School of Music, from which he received a master's degree in performance in 1976. He is the author of the nonfiction book, Other People's Blood: U.S. Immigration Prisons in the Reagan Decade, and An Honest Thief, a novella and stories. He is news editor for Courthouse News Service.