Ethan Andrew Canin (born July 19, 1960) is an American author, educator, and physician.

Canin was born in Ann Arbor, Michigan, while his parents were vacationing from Iowa City, where his father, Stuart Canin, taught violin at the University of Iowa.

He and his family moved around the midwestern and northeastern United States, and eventually settled in San Francisco, California, where he attended Town School and later graduated from San Francisco University High School.

He attended Stanford University and earned an undergraduate degree in English.

[1] Beginning his medical practice with a residency at the University of California San Francisco, he pursued both medicine and writing for several years, leaving medicine in 1995[2] to join the faculty of the Iowa Writers' Workshop, where he still teaches.