I was born in Philadelphia, Pennsylvania. Many people claim this, but in my case it is true. I was born in a hospital that no longer exists! Well, it exists, but in a different building. They tore down the building I was born in and now it is just a smoldering hole in the ground! (Or a Subway or something. I don’t know. I don’t just hang around where I was born. I was born and I just got on with it! I never looked back! I URGE YOU TO DO THE SAME.)

I was an only child, which means that I know how to play Candyland by myself. I was always one of those reading and writing kids. After a little dalliance with astronomy (I had a glow in the dark star chart) and archaeology (I had a little shovel), I declared my intention to become a writer at the age of eight or nine or so. “I shall be a writer,” I said. “And I will develop no other skills to ensure I have no back up plan!”

I graduated from the University of Delaware, home of the Fighting Blue Hens. I was a writing major, but I spent most of my time working on shows. After college, I became the literary manager of a wonderful (but now defunct) Philadelphia theater company. Soon after that, I moved to New York to study theatrical dramaturgy and writing at Columbia University School of the Arts. As a graduate student, I held at least a dozen different jobs to pay my way through school. These included: working in a haunted house theme restaurant, being a fake employee for a company to make it look like more people worked there than actually did, and working on a show in Las Vegas that had live tigers and malfunctioning smoke machines in the same enclosed area. I was also an editor.

I spend most of my time writing books. You can find out more about those books by clicking on the BOOKS link above.