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About

This site highlights some upcoming and past fiction projects, including Strivers and Other Stories, my short story collection which won a Washington Writers’ Publishing House (WWPH) Fiction Prize. I’m currently querying a second completed novel manuscript. A 2024 Kimbilio fellow, I also serve in a production and editorial role on the WWPH board, which helps to keep me actively engaged in the D.C. area small press and literary community.

Me

I was born and raised in Augusta, Georgia, the home of the Masters golf tournament and James Brown. The youngest of seven siblings, I had a well-fed and fun childhood: good grades except for conduct and math, a sprawling ranch house with a big backyard/neighborhood playground, Baptist church, vacation Bible school, big Sunday dinners with long opening prayers,  library story time visits, Boy Scout camping adventures, summer academic programs, the metric system, beach vacations, color TV with cable, Matchbox cars, hide-and-go-seek, kickball, and “roll to the bat.”

I had good parents, book-loving educators both; no childhood drama, save a few dog bites and not wanting to go to kindergarten or Sunday school. I went off to Northwestern University, survived freshman year, played trumpet in the finest marching band in the land, and eventually got a degree in English Literature and Writing. During my senior year, I asked a career counselor what to do next and he replied, “What do you like to do?” I told him I like to write. He said, “Have you thought about marketing and advertising?” I thought about it and went to grad school at the University of Georgia’s Grady School of Journalism and Mass Communications to study that. Moved to the Washington, D.C. area in ’93 and have been there ever since.

Writing

The first story I remember writing was about a shark. It was called “Sharky.” My second-grade teacher at Terrace Manor Elementary (TMU!) really liked it. I started writing stories again while an English major and in the undergrad writing program at Northwestern, where my literary pursuits were influenced by some darn good professors like Barbara Newman, Kenneth Warren, Robert Boswell, Lawrence Evans, and Joseph Epstein, even though the latter two’s patrician conservative aesthetics grated me and most of my classmates. Good life lesson though: open your mind and you can learn from anybody.

I completed a novella for a senior project and have subsequently written dozens of short stories, a few screenplays, and a couple of novel manuscripts. I am currently querying an adult novel manuscript dealing with a family’s history, generational relationships, and Black migration.

Over the years, I’ve participated in small self-formed writing groups and a number of formal summer writing workshops (VONA/Voices, the Iowa Summer Writing Festival, George Washington University’s community workshops, Hurston/Wright Writers Week at Howard University, Augusta University’s Sandhill’s Writer’s Conference, the Callaloo Journal of African Diaspora Arts and Letters workshop at Oxford, the Sewanee Writers’ Conference at the University of the South, Tin House at Reed College in Oregon, and Kimbilio at SMU Taos in New Mexico). On jobs, I’ve been known to write lengthy emails with typos and very detailed documentation.

What I Write About

Many of my short stories are rooted in family history and lore. Some are inspired by my childhood in Georgia during the 70s and 80s—an under-appreciated and stylistic time and place in my estimation—as those post-civil-rights decades down South were so full of new adventures, opportunities, color palettes, and promises unfulfilled. Others are simple explorations of characters who find themselves faced with the small conflicts and moral dilemmas of everyday life.

Like many first efforts, my first novel manuscript drew from real-life experiences: going to college, meeting people, working for the man, making life choices along the way. It is also reflective of my fiction writing process, which attempts to “answer” the questions I have about how individuals (characters) navigate the systems and people that regulate their lives and how that subtly plays out in personal interactions. My second novel manuscript is about a protagonist unearthing his family’s history with the help of a chorus of long-lost relatives, dead and alive. I am currently working on a third novel manuscript.

My fiction tends to be very character-focused and driven by dialogue and crisply defined, efficient scenes. Friends, fellow writers, and past workshop participants have commented that my writing is clean, occasionally witty, and unpretentious. At least one reader compared my writing to Mat Johnson, and an editor compared me to Edward P. Jones—which I take as grand compliments. I just like telling stories.

Writers I Admire

Random short list of historical and contemporary writers whose writing at one time or another made me pause and think to myself, “I wish I could write like that!“: Walter Mosley, Kate Chopin, Colson Whitehead, Zora Neale Hurston, Junot Díaz, Michael Chabon, Chester Himes, Toni Morrison, Ralph Ellison, Philip Roth, George Pelecanos, Charles Chesnutt, Paul Laurence Dunbar, Furman Bisher. Comps to my current novel manuscript include Yaa Gyasi’s Homegoing, Margaret Sexton’s A Kind of Freedom, Honorée Fanonne Jeffers’ The Love Songs of W.E.B. Du Bois, and Morgan Jerkins’ Zeal.

Professional

Professionally I have been involved in some form of website development, digital program management, content strategy, or digital marketing and advertising for a few decades.

I back-doored into digital first at a start-up that wanted to be the Associated Press of online news photography. Then I worked as a copywriter with one of the early “interactive” agencies. At the height of the dot-com era, we were cranking out banner advertising, “landing pages,” and full websites almost around the clock. I even got to create a national brand name. With what seemed like an endless supply of venture capital funding, eager clients, and microbrewed beer, we spent most of our days coming up with ideas to promote things like credit cards, annuities, and home equity loans and seeing them come to fruition in a few days’ time. It was the most fun I ever had doing something I got paid for, but around 2001, the clock struck midnight. I went on to learn about actual web technology and managing web and digital marketing projects at IT firms, an investment funds company, the marketing services arm of a well-known seniors advocacy organization, and at a leading policy research consultancy.

Latest Updates

Musings, writing-related updates, this and that: