About Me

 
 

I was born in Trenton, NJ and grew up in Lawrenceville, New Jersey. I didn’t catch onto reading and writing until second grade when I discovered comic books. I became a huge comic book fan starting out with Batman, Superman, Green Lantern, and The Flash, and moving onto the Marverlous World of Marvel with Spiderman, The Fantastic Four, The Hulk, Dr. Strange, and pretty much everyone else in their stable. Comic books turned me on to reading, writing, and drawing.


I began writing things other than comic books in the fourth grade under the guidance of Mrs. Lois Walker who encouraged us to write about whatever we wanted. I wrote spy, horror, adventure, and mystery stories. I kept writing all through the grades, having a blast in junior high and high school, writing mostly satire with my friends, Bob Litowitz and Dan Hammer. We wrote lots of crazy stuff for class assignments including a radio play called Planet of the Termites.

I attended Rutgers College as an art and education major and slowed down on the writing. Instead I got into acting and did a few shows there while also doing lots of artwork. I did write one short story for a Science Fiction class in which I featured the professor in a parody that focused on how incredibly boring the class was. Didn’t get a good grade on that one. After college I got married and began teaching elementary grades and art in New Jersey, Scotland, and Saudi Arabia. While in Scotland, I was at a park one day when I had an incredible conversation with two young Scottish boys who were curious about Americans. That conversation became the basis of the first story I had published and really got me writing again. So, you never know where an idea will come from.

I came back to the states in 1989 and wrote another piece about my parents sending me from the suburbs where we lived to my grandparents in Jersey City for summer vacations. I called it “The Reverse Fresh Air Fund.” It was published in New Jersey Monthly under the title, “Summer in the City.”

My son was born in 1990. He provided me with lots of writing material and I spent a few years writing for many parenting publications. My daughter came along in 1992 and provided another book due to her incredible birth (She weighed less than a pound). In 1995 I submitted an article on some teaching ideas I had to Instructor Magazine. That lead to many more articles for Instructor and more than fifteen books for teachers through Scholastic over the last ten years. So, “Write what you know,” has been good advice for me.

REBOUND is my first book for young adults. LOVE PUPPIES AND CORNER KICKS is the first for middle grades. Hopefully there are more to come for both groups of readers. When I’m not writing I enjoy being with my family as well as playing basketball, running, reading, movies, crabbing, and any beach.