I am an Ohio native living in the greater Cincinnati area. I attended Colerain High School. In my senior year, I won the Ohio High School Creative Writing Contest sponsored by the College of Wooster and was published in the Wooster Review. I then attended Miami University (Ohio) to get my Bachelor of Philosophy in Interdisciplinary Studies (The Western College Program). I sometimes refer to this as my Jeopardy degree, since I learned a little about lots of different fields. For program requirements, we had to do a senior project and I wrote a short novel. The afterword of that, a story called “The Year That Had a Santa Claus” was later published in the magazine Midnight Zoo. After graduating from Miami, I went to Emerson College in Boston to pursue my MFA in creative writing. I concentrated in Fiction Writing and wrote a collection of short stories for my master’s creative thesis. About half of those stories have been published.

After completing my MFA, I returned to Cincinnati and began teaching part-time at Northern Kentucky University and also Raymond Walters College of the University of Cincinnati. I eventually added Miami University – Hamilton as well. In 2000, I began my career as a full-time creative writing professor at Northern Kentucky University. I retired from there in 2018 and have been enjoying my retirement immensely.

My writing interests are eclectic. I write both fiction and poetry regularly and creative nonfiction sometimes. My fiction and poetry are often speculative in nature (in other words, science fiction and fantasy) but not always. I write what I like and what hits me at the time.