I was born August 8, 1968 in Baltimore, Maryland. At the age of 4 my family moved to Quincy, Illinois, located on the banks of the Mississippi River. This is where most of my stories take place (although, in the stories, Quincy is called Currie Valley). Nothing much happened for a while.

Then, in high school, I became an actor. Being on the stage made everything else tolerable. Plays. Musicals. Concert, Show and Swing Choirs. My friends and I formed GeekShow, a comedy group that performed skits at our New Faces talent show. I realized that a lot of things would come and go in my life: friends, jobs, girlfriends, but theater would always be there. It would be constant. I graduated from High School in 1986.

I moved from Quincy to Carbondale to attend Southern Illinois University. More acting. More plays. More comedy. While I hated high school, I loved college. My interest in theater evolved and I started directing plays. It was even better than acting! I graduated in 1990 with a BA in Theater.

After college, I toured as a writer/performer with "Authorized Personnel: A Comedy and Improv Team". We hit a lot of places between the Mississippi River and the eastern seaboard (Illinois, Ohio, Indiana, Pennsylvania, Maryland, West Virginia and a couple other states that I'm sure I'm forgetting). While I wasn't on the road, I had the worst job in the world working as a baby photographer. This was all in Bloomington, Indiana, where AP had its headquarters, and Bloomington, Indiana is where I started to take an interest in playwriting.

Authorized Personnel split up in 1991, but I stayed in Bloomington to try my luck at other ventures. I wanted to direct at the Bloomington Playwrights Project and a logical way to get my foot in the door was to take one of their playwriting classes. It worked. I got to direct some stuff, but I also wrote a couple of plays and discovered that I liked the writing process. In 1992, the Playwrights Project did a one-act I wrote called "Dr. Goat: Goat Doctor". It was the first play I ever had produced.

While in Bloomington I did a lot of things. In addition to beinga playwright, a director, a comedian and a baby photographer, I also did more acting, I worked at a pizza restaurant, I was a circus clown and I started my own theater company, Iguana Productions. In 1993 I figured I'd accomplished everything I wanted to accomplish in Bloomington. I'd always talked about living in Chicago, it seemed like a fine time to make the move.

In the Windy City I continued writing plays. I produced and directed some stuff with Iguana Productions. I found work in more live theater Box Offices than I'd care to remember. I met people in the Chicago theater community and started to think that maybe theater wasn't all that I hoped it would be. It wasn't giving me the satisfaction it once had. I still believed it would always be there, but now I started to wonder if I wanted it to always be there. In 1998, I started to focus less on writing plays and more on writing fiction and one year later my story "TheRedemption of Tyler Jack" was published in Pirate Writings Magazine. It was my first professional sale.

I’ve had more stories published since then and I’ve had more plays produced (In fact, I’ve been far more successful as a playwright since losing interest in theater). I’ve even managed to get a book of short stories published, “The Undertow of Small Town Dreams” (it’s currently available from Twilight Tales Publications). Iguana Productions has evolved into Iguana Publications (we publish cheap, no frills chapbooks). I'm a member of the Horror Writers Association, Mystery Writers of America, The Short Mystery Fiction Society and Private Eye Writers of America.

So that's me. Who are you? Feel free to e-mail me and tell me about yourself.