ABOUT THE AUTHOR

I was born quite premature, weighing a little over two pounds, at 9:15 AM, August 6, 1942, in Columbus, Ohio, and was not expected to survive. I did not talk until three years old and the first thing I said was, “I want a cookie.” This was witnessed by my mother and grandmother. At four and five I wore leg braces like Forrest Gump, and was underweight until eight years of age. Westerville High School graduation took place in May, 1960. With mediocre grades in high school, I worked in a metal foundry for a year. Started at Otterbein University in 1961 and graduated in 1967 as an English major; the same year I married the love of my life, Carol Jean Hammond, who graduated from Otterbein in 1969 and also taught for thirty-two years, mainly at Sycamore Community Schools. She earned her Masters in Education at the University of. Cincinnati in 1974 after I earned my Masters in Education at Bowling Green State University in 1970. I was elected a Fellow in the Ohio Writing Project at Miami University in the 1990s.

I taught senior British and world literature most of my thirty-seven-year career, thirty-five years in Ohio college prep schools in Whitehall-Yearling, in Columbus, Indian Hill High School where I was also the chess advisor; and at Mason schools, where I also taught Advanced Placement; and two years back in 1970-1972 at Escola Graduada, a private American school in Sao Paulo, Brazil. After retiring in 2003, I wrote and self-published four speculative fiction novels through iUniverse from 2006-2008. My wife and I returned to live in Westerville to be nearer to our daughter Kim, her husband, Dr. Paul Paik and their two children: Owen and Brennan, after three wonderful decades in Mason, Ohio.