The short version: Raised in New Jersey, colleged in Florida, careered in SoCal and happily making my home in Mississippi, I write fiction, nonfiction and the odd (in the sense of occasional, but also in the sense of weird?) poem.

A longer version: I was born into an immigrant-headed household, becoming the first member of my family to attend college. At the miracle-working Eckerd College in St. Petersburg, Florida, I zipped through the whole shebang in three years (it was expensive and I was gonna be a real adult, dammit!) and graduated with high honors as a double major in writing and literature. Reformed after a high school career marked by sloth, defiance and facial piercings, I received The Letters Collegium Award of Honor for Excellence in Literature, as well as a Freeman Award for Study in Asia, with which I completed independent research on the Vedic practice of yātrā (यात्रा), or religious pilgrimage, over nearly one month in India.

Today, I consider myself a blue-collar writer, grateful as all get-out (every day, no joke) for the gift of making a living by working with words. I began my career in magazines at 21 years old, living in Southern California after graduating. Since then, I’ve worked for more than two decades as a writer and editor for dozens of print and digital publications, both on staff and as a freelancer. Being an editor means I’m really good at finding mistakes and endlessly looking for ways to make stuff just a little bit better (Virgo rising here), which is great for magazines and exhausting in most other areas of life.

After college, I kept learning, but I never got no fancy MFA. I’ve studied writing, literature and editing at UCLA Extension in Los Angeles and the University of Mississippi Graduate School in Oxford, where I volunteered as a fiction reader for the Yalobusha Review. Since 2022, I’ve tried to carry my teachers’ knowledge forward as a volunteer mentor for Girls Write Now, a New York City-based nonprofit that matches experienced writers with high school and college students from under-served populations. (Look it up and support them, please! It’s an amazing organization.)

After a couple of decades being mostly a literary deadbeat, I’m writing again and publishing post-pandemic. My creative nonfiction, fiction and poetry have been published or are forthcoming in The Rumpus, Cleaver Magazine, Necessary Fiction, Bending Genres, Unlost and elsewhere. I will be completing an artist residency at the Virginia Center for the Creative Arts in spring 2026 (read the press release here), where I’ll be working on a memoir in essays that explores themes of addiction, identity, belonging, second comings and the underlying wisdom of life’s natural cycles.

Hobby- and passion-wise, I’m into photography, the blues, Vedic traditions, tarot cards, sun-dried tomatoes, buying too many books, country roads and 1950s tunes. See my Instagram page for my photos focused on “finding beauty in the crumbling, aging, forgotten, imperfect and ‘unsightly,’ all over the world.” (I also really like fleeing the country.) Work-wise, I’ve been a local-newspaper restaurant reviewer, oft-cursed telemarketer, rock-and-roll drummer, hand model and boxing ringside reporter.

Thank you for stopping by and, as always—because it is a big deal—for reading.

Testimonials on My Literary Genius

“You’re a talented writer.” —my fifth-grade English/science/penmanship teacher