Tried to fly when I was three, been a pirate since I could read, secretly at work on a time machine.
I write family dramas, coming of age stories, and dark comedy. I love to watch fantasy, sci-fi, quirky adventure, action, and spy films, though I only occasionally read books in these genres. I mostly read literary and upmarket fiction as well as micro-fiction and contemporary poetry. I have an MFA from Bennington College and am the founding Director of Writing Programs at Salem Art Works, in Salem, NY.
I’ve published short stories and poems in nationally recognized literary journals and have won a few regional and national writing contests. I’ve been awarded an Artists’ Fellowship Award for Fiction and an Individual Artist Project Grant from the Illinois Arts Council.
I’m perennially fascinated with the stripping away of youthful innocence for deeper insights into the human condition. Having grown up with two mentally handicapped brothers, I often find myself returning to stories about brothers at the moment of discovery of their strengths and limitations in relation to the broader world outside their family structures.
I’m currently revising my debut novel, Forty Miles an Hour, a darkly comic coming of age story, set in Rhode Island in 1987, about a troubled college senior and an eccentric, semi-retired contractor who takes him under his wing as they both come to terms with their own shortcomings and learn what it truly means to make sacrifices for the ones we love.