About
Origins
Before I had a name for what I was, I was already writing. Before the word “author” had found its proper home along the corridor of my aspirations — before the diplomas and the bylines and the business cards and the long, winding roads of agency life had come and gone like seasons — there were books. Small, self-stitched, crayon-crowned books I built with my own hands in elementary school, where the worlds inside my head were too wide and wild to be contained by anything smaller than a page.
I have been writing since before I remember remembering. That is the only honest beginning.
At Old Dominion University, studying for a BA in English with an emphasis in Creative Writing, I moved through corridors of language the way some people move through cathedrals — with a hush and a hunger, a quiet reverence for all the voices that had come before. The Romantics called to me first: Blake with his burning tigers and heavenly lambs, Wordsworth communing with mountains as though they whispered back, Shelley flinging skyward in electric, ineffable flight, and Byron — glorious, combustible, catastrophically human Byron — who made ruin seem like poetry and poetry seem like a dare.
Then Science Fiction found me. Or perhaps I found it. Or perhaps we simply collided — two forces of imagination arriving at the same crossroads at the same appointed hour. Whatever the mechanics of it, I was never the same.
Mentors & The Festival
Later, the poets arrived. Not only through the books — though the books were never far — but in the living, breathing, barnstorming form of mentors.
Bruce Weigl, my poetry instructor, who understood that the best poems are not written but survived, opened my eyes. And then came the literary festivals — where the air crackled with syllables and significance and something very close to electricity — and with them, Amiri Baraka and Nikki Giovanni, two of the language’s most luminous and unrelenting architects.
My fiction instructor, Tony Ardizzone, moved through stories the way a sculptor moves through marble: purposeful, patient, finding what was already there.
I will never forget shaking hands with the late, great Amiri Baraka.
It was an ODU Literary Festival I had helped organize — weeks of letters and logistics and sleepless, pre-event scrambling — and there he stood, present and percussive as a drumbeat, as alive to the moment as his poems were to truth.
He asked me, with a frankness I was not prepared for, who I wrote for.
I needed a moment. The room rearranged itself around that question.
He signed and handed me a photograph with a soft smirk, and I slowly backed away, retreating to a corner to review all the books and notebooks I’d been carrying, eyes still glazed. That autographed photo still hangs, framed, on my office wall. It has never come down, nor shall it.
The Winding Path
During summer breaks, I found myself in the inky trenches of local community newspapers — learning the rhythms of the press, the pulse of the deadline, the peculiar pride of seeing your words in print for the first time.
I wrote for multiple publications, climbed into editorial roles, and began to understand — painfully, gradually, the way you understand anything that matters — that the road ahead was narrower than I had imagined.
The landscape was clear and unforgiving: most local newspapers sought applicants bearing the letters MFA like a kind of passport, and connections to known, established journalists served as the stamp that proved you belonged.
Without those advantages, the best I could earn was a “stringer” position — part-time, irregular, the journalism equivalent of renting rather than owning. Publishers, too, kept their doors sealed against strangers without credentials or connections.
And so the crossroads arrived, as crossroads always do: uninvited, unhurried, and absolutely certain of its own importance.
I could toil faithfully on the Great American Novel while accepting under-employment — the particular indignity of a position that does not fit, like wearing someone else’s coat — or I could choose the winding, uncertain, fertile path of agency work and hustle.
I chose the winding path.
As side ventures, I wrote for the Naples Daily News, the Fox Reality TV network, and approximately fifty print and online publications. But the engine that would carry me forward was not the byline — it was the business.
I was among the few graduates in my region who could build a website from the ground up, write all its content including the SEO, and coordinate with management from conception to launch. That particular constellation of capabilities — rare in those early digital days — turned out to be a lantern worth carrying.
I moved to Colorado. I formed my own LLC, small and nimble and fiercely efficient, and began to study the unconventional, the inexpensive, the counterintuitive paths to scale. One spoke in the wheel I turned: teaching workshops — tailored, targeted tutorials aimed at markets most hungry for digital intelligence. Another: volunteering with nonprofits, those organizations straining forward on stretched budgets and fierce conviction, where I could step in as a digital marketing mentor and make an immediate, measurable difference in their reach and their receipts. A third spoke: blogging — daily, sometimes — local SEO terms stitched carefully into posts, cross-posted to event calendars, coordinated with workshops, looped back through social channels until the entire wheel was turning fast enough to generate its own momentum.
The traction came. The wheel kept turning.
I went on to teach workshops for Microsoft, the WordPress Foundation, the City of Denver, the City of Aurora, Johnson & Wales University, the Open Media Foundation, and numerous private colleges, corporations, and organizations — on subjects ranging from digital marketing and SEO to small business growth, startup funding, freelancing, and the architecture of enterprise marketing. My workshops reached thousands — perhaps tens of thousands — of entrepreneurs and business owners navigating the beautiful, bewildering new digital frontier.
Politics
Then came a slim, charismatic organizer and factotum named Barack Obama — a rising star in the Democratic Party, and in the hearts of millions something larger: a signal that the country was still capable of surprise, still capable of hope.
His grassroots organizing, his keen and luminous intelligence, his extraordinary gift for words that move people rather than merely inform them — all of it resonated with what Baraka and Giovanni had already planted in me.
And so I pursued training in political campaign messaging — rigorous, intensive, conducted by a consortium of the Colorado Board of Education, The White House Project, and the Center for Progressive Leadership.
I studied alongside campaign consultants, managers, and future candidates; leveraging past peregrinations in marketing and communications from years past.
I went on to consult with six campaigns across the State of Colorado. The wheel turned. The seasons melted away like watercolors in the rain. And eventually, all things arrive at their true destination.
Homeward
I am long-retired from that world now.
And the written word — patient, luminous, waiting — has called me home.
I have authored several collections of poetry, a number of marketing books, and continue to build toward more substantial works.
The science fiction trilogy that has lived in my imagination for years is slowly taking shape, syllable by syllable, world by world.
I have read my poetry at venues across Florida, Virginia, and Colorado; hosted readings; organized a literary festival; participated in events that celebrated the singular, irreplaceable power of the word spoken aloud, twisted tales told through tormented throats to amaze and awaken, and prose that could bring the toughest to weep or mourn lost loves.
I love poetry slams — everyone should attend at least one, if only to be reminded that language is a living thing, wild and warm and capable of miracles. I love spoken word events, collaborative literary endeavors, and every initiative that treats storytelling as the essential act it has always been.
To paraphrase the incomparable Ursula K. Le Guin: there is no time to spare. There are books still to write — non-fiction and fiction, poetry and prose, worlds mapped and worlds as yet unnamed. Whether the winding road will one day circle back toward progressive causes and the politics of the possible, only time and synergy will reveal.
What I ask of you, gentle reader, is nothing complicated. Only this: an open mind. A willingness to believe that the American Dream is still worth dreaming. And an openness to the worlds of wonder that the written word — my written word, if you will grant it the chance — can still illuminate, if given a fair and faithful hearing.