I have spent a professional lifetime in the high school English classroom, which means I have taught The Great Gatsby enough times to recite passages from memory. As a student, I was inspired by the work of writers like E.M. Forster, Ford Madox Ford, Virginia Woolf, Edith Wharton, Willa Cather, and William Faulkner. Now, I write fiction that I hope may contribute something new to the ongoing conversation of British and American literature. My work aims for the depth and nuance of Modernism while remaining accessible to a wide readership. I love to craft new novels and stories that respond to and sometimes expand on the great classics.

And, after 25 years of helping teenagers discover literature and find their voices in writing, I am currently refining my own. I am an MFA candidate in the Maslow Family Creative Writing program at Wilkes University, where I am actively working on my debut project. My upcoming novel will offer an answer to the century-old question of how Jimmy Gatz of North Dakota became Jay Gatsby of Long Island.

I grew up in the Philadelphia suburbs at a time when everyone still rode their bike around the neighborhood without a helmet and telephones were attached to your house. Today, I live in Pennsylvania with my wife where we look forward to retirement so we can adopt dogs again. (No one is going to work when there’s a puppy.) When not writing, I am an avid consumer of prestige television and an improving home cook. There is always a pizza in the freezer, just in case.