Biography

When someone asks me what I do for a living, I answer honestly: I teach high school. I feel no need to puff out my chest and bluster about being a writer. I started writing seriously in my early-20s, and like a trained monkey, I've kept at it. Other than listing stuff that I've written, that's all there is to say about me as a writer. 

When it comes to the biographical data, it's also fairly mundane. I grew up in West Warwick, Rhode Island, the home of winners. As a kid, I wanted to be the catcher for The Red Sox, and then, during my teenage years, my goals changed, and I either wanted to join the priesthood, walk in the righteous path of Jesus, or drive a Zamboni.

Instead, I went to college.

I did my undergraduate work at Plymouth State University in Plymouth, New Hampshire, where I joined a frat and lived out the John Landis movie Animal House. Somehow, I managed to come away with a degree in English and my teacher certification. After college, I lived and taught in Las Vegas for a year (a long story) then moved back to New England, where I'm smack-dab in the middle of Red Sox country and can watch all the Sox and Pats games.

I have an MFA in fiction writing from the University of New Hampshire where I worked with the kick-ass writers Alexander Parsons and Tom Paine.  

I currently live in Manchester, New Hampshire, with my beautiful wife Liz and two beautiful children, Paige and Owen. For the past decade-plus, I have been teaching English at Pembroke Academy in Pembroke, New Hampshire.

Along the way, I have been fortunate to have a few books, chapbooks, and other pieces of writing published. In 2002, my first hardcover collection of short fiction, Frostbite, was published by the now-defunct Green Bean Press. In October of 2003, my first full-length collection of poetry Not So Profound was also published by Green Bean Press. I had other two full-length books of poems published by Sunnyoutside Press, Teaching Metaphors in 2007 and After the Honeymoon in 2009. I am the author of several chapbooks, most of which are long out-of-print. 

My writing has been nominated for numerous Pushcart Prizes and resoundingly denied every time. I mean, not even close. And anyone who has published in the small journals has likely been nominated for a Pushcart at one time or another. In 2007, Teaching Metaphors, a collection of poetry that documents my experiences teaching high school, was named Best Local Collection of Poetry for 2007 by The Hippo Press in Southern New Hampshire. In 2011, my short story "Fishbone" was a finalist for The Norman Mailer Prize awarded by The National Council of Teachers of English. I received a trophy for that one. I'm not joking. When I was a kid, I used to have a lot of trophies. Does that count for anything?

My recent offerings to the world of obscurity have been fiction. In 2012, Bottle of Smoke Press published a collection of short prose pieces titled Hangover Breakfasts, and Marginalia Publishing put out a novella titled Some Sort of Ugly, a coming-of-age-type story set at a college in The White Mountains. Hmm.  

I currently write a Red Sox column for Dirty Water News in Boston and am training to be a competitive dead-lifter.