Coake is the author of a collection of short stories, We're in Trouble (Harcourt, 2005), for which he was awarded the PEN/Robert Bingham fellowship in 2006. He was named by the 2007 issue of the British fiction journal Granta as one of the twenty "Best Young American Novelists."

Coake currently resides in Reno, Nevada, where he teaches creative writing at the University of Nevada, Reno. He is currently at work on his first novel.