Rice was born in 1955 in Washington, D.C. He received his bachelor's and master's degrees at the University of Virginia, where his studies focused on English and American literature. He later earned an M.F.A. and a doctorate at the University of Michigan, Ann Arbor, where he won a Hopwood Writing Award and the Brubacher Prize in the History of Education. His publications include: "Public Discourse & Academic Inquiry", a study in the sociology of knowledge; "Characteristics of Exemplary Schools"; a special edited volume of the "Harvard Review" commemorating Seamus Heaney’s Nobel Prize; and more than fifty articles, reviews, essays, stories, and poems in such periodicals as "The New Criterion", "Policy Review", "The Sewanee Review", "The Washington Post", and "The Common Review: The Magazine of the Great Books Foundation". He has also worked as an Alfa Romeo mechanic, a warden at the Adirondack Mountain Reserve, and the manager of an antiques shop.