Born in Berlin, Germany, in 1966 and raised in Upstate New York, I grew up a townie Gen-X punk in Binghamton, NY. In the mid-1980s, I headed to Syracuse University, where I met a passel of blackhearted rogues who remain my center of gravity to this day. After graduation, I moved to London, where I tended bar at a rowdy, affable joint called The Live and Let Live Pub, learning in the process that sometimes the best thing goofy whiteboy college twerps could do was to shut up and learn. After getting that taste of the wider world, I returned home in 1990 with a need to make a plan and little idea of what that would be.

Shortly thereafter, a favorite teacher died, and I decided to pursue a career in education to honor him, earning a Master of Arts in Teaching from Binghamton University in 1991. From 1992 through 2004, I taught social studies at FDR High School in Brooklyn. I loved the kids and hated the administration. In the end, twelve years was enough, and I again hit the road, working, writing, and traveling through Central America, South America, India, and Nepal for the next two years.

In 2006, I tried to reintegrate into the United States and failed miserably, fleeing again to Antigua, Guatemala. There, I tended bar at Café No Se, a legendary redoubt of wandering poets, lunatics, and the occasional bank robber on the lam. I also co-founded and ran La Cuadra Magazine, a political and cultural quarterly, for a decade until Hereditary Hemochromatosis nearly knocked me out of existence while kindly gifting me a story to tell in the process.

You can read the introduction to my soon-to-be-published memoir, Incompatible With Life: A Story of Grave Illness, Great Love, and Survival, here.