I was born on the San Francisco peninsula in 1956 and grew up in Redwood City, California. One of the most formative experiences of my life occurred in 1963-1964, when I spent a year in Europe, mostly in Italy, with my family. I attended the University of California at Berkeley from 1974 to 1987, spending three of those years studying in Italy and eventually earning a Ph.D. in Italian literature. In 1988 my wife and I moved to Illinois, where we raised two sons. From 1988 until 2019 I served as professor of Italian at Northern Illinois University in De Kalb, my current residence. My first publications have been academic, dealing mostly with the Italian literature of the Middle Ages and Renaissance and involving much archival research in European libraries. 

 

Over the years, I have been inspired by the landscape surrounding my family home in Corral de Tierra near Salinas, where fog from the Pacific spills through the oak-strewn valleys. Although I have been an indefatigable journal and essay writer since youth, and have occasionally devoted myself to composing poetry, for many years I imagined my more creative efforts to be mostly for my own eyes. Then, in 2012, my involvement with a secular student association at NIU led me to become fascinated by the presence of genocide and ethnic cleansing in the Old Testament, especially in the biblical account of the siege and fall of Jericho. Wishing to tell the story from the perspective of the people trapped inside the city, I researched the ancient Canaanites and wrote a tragic play titled Only the Harlot Shall Live. This, in turn, inspired my first novel Harlots of Jericho, a humanistic retelling of the episode. My efforts in fiction have been eclectic, wandering from science fiction to biblical fiction, from classical/mythological fantasy to a dystopian account of latter-day U.S. civil war. I am currently working on a variety of projects, including a historical novel dealing with the culture of slavery in early nineteenth-century Georgia.

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