About the author

About the author

The Sleeping Giant, left. Hiking to the “castle” at the top is a rite of Hamden childhood.

After the Beatles were on Ed Sullivan, my dad brought their first album home from Sears, where he worked.

I was born and raised in Hamden, Connecticut, land of the Sleeping Giant, just outside New Haven and about an hour and a half from New York City.

My mom, Gloria, told me I taught myself to read by looking at the obituaries in the New Haven Register. I grew up with two brothers, John and Joe. Our dad, Pat, read us classics like Robinson Crusoe, and was forever reciting poems like “The Highwayman.” (To this day, I see the moon as “a ghostly galleon tossed upon cloudy seas.”) My mom didn’t believe in censorship, and when I outgrew the kiddie section at Miller Memorial Library, she scandalized the librarian by allowing me to choose my own books. My sixth-grade teacher was shocked – shocked! – because my mom let me read The Catcher in the Rye when I was eleven.
If you want to figure out how old I am, you can do the math: I was in second grade during the Cuban Missile Crisis, in third grade when the Beatles came to America and when President Kennedy was assassinated.

From the time I learned how to form letters, I loved writing stories and poems. I wrote my first “book” the summer I was going into third grade. I always wrote on looseleaf paper. A package cost a quarter, which was the amount of my allowance, so that worked out pretty well. To this day, I write my drafts in longhand – usually in spiral-bound notebooks like the one at right.

I went to Centerville School on Dixwell Avenue, kindergarten through 6th grade; it’s now the site of the Miller Memorial Library. After that I attended Blessed Sacrament Junior High and graduated from Sacred Heart Academy, both also in Hamden. For college, I went to the University of Connecticut, and grew so attached to the place that after I got my bachelor’s degree in psychology, I returned for a master’s in American literature. My favorite place at UConn was Jaime K. Arjona Hall, left, home of the English department. My favorite person in that place was Professor J.D. O’Hara, who taught me all the important things about being a writer. Chief among them, for me, was that writing is easy; rewriting is hard.
After grad school I bounced around for a while: worked at an ad agency, lived in England, and finally ended up becoming a newspaper copy editor. I spent most of that career at the Philadelphia Inquirer, but before that I worked at the Hartford Courant. I’m married and I have two sons and a two black dogs, a labradoodle named Shelby and a rescue dog called Shadow. We live just outside Philadelphia.
Questions? Send me an email. I always answer emails.