William L. Harwood was born in Burlington, Vermont in 1946, and raised in Grand Forks, North Dakota. In May 1977, he trained with the former US Information Agency in Washington DC as a Foreign Service Information Officer doing Press and Cultural work in the U.S. embassies. He went on to serve in U.S. Information Service centers in Bangladesh, Nepal, India, Pakistan, Poland, Russia, and Somalia until retiring in 1998.