Born in Carrington, North Dakota, Woiwode attended the University of Illinois at Urbana–Champaign for four and a half years, where he worked with John Frederick Nims and Charles Shattuck, and after serving as copywriter and voice-over and live talent for a CBS affiliate in the area he left to live in New York for five years. He returned to New York state after the death of John Gardner, and took Gardner's position as director of the Creative Writing Program at Binghamton University; he was a tenured full professor there, besides directing the Creative Writing Program. He spent several years living and working on short stories and his third novel in the Chicago area before returning to North Dakota in 1978, where he lived twelve miles outside Mott and raised registered quarterhorses.
Besides his tenure at Binghamton, he served as Writer in Residence at the University of Wisconsin, Madison, and conducted summer sessions as a professor at Wheaton College, Chicago, and the C.S. Lewis Seminars at Cambridge; he also conducted seminars and workshops in fourteen states of the U.S., all of the Canadian provinces but British Columbia, and in England, Lithuania, and Scandinavia. His work has been translated into a dozen languages, and Johnathan Yardley of The Washington Post Book World named Beyond the Bedroom Wall one of the 20 best novels of the 20th Century. Woiwode published a dozen books in a variety of genres, six of which have been named notable books of the year by the New York Times Book Review. Among his recent publications are two memoirs that were widely reviewed: What I Think I Did and A Step From Death.