I was born and raised in Nebraska—a place where people prefer you think well of them should you think of them at all—and attended the University of Nebraska and John F. Kennedy College, where I studied English literature and history with a focus on creative writing. While in college, I won the Mari Sandoz Prize for my short story, “The Tourist,” and subsequently moved to Los Angeles where I wrote sketch comedy, started another novel, and starved. After a couple of years I gave up writing and went to medical school at the University of Nebraska followed by post-doctoral training and teaching/research appointments at the University of Iowa, Brown University Program in Medicine, and the University of Texas Southwestern in Dallas. Twenty years passed and I authored or co-authored forty scientific articles, abstracts, and textbook chapters but no fiction. Then, one day in my office in Dallas, the idea for a novel popped into my head. More ideas for stories followed and I was suddenly writing fiction again. 

In 1994, my first literary publication in two decades, “The Next One,” appeared in the journal, The Long Story. More literary publications followed, including a collection of short stories, Howling at the Moon. A novel, Treasure of the Blue Whale, was published by Regal House in 2020. A 2021 Silver Medalist in the IBPA Benjamin Franklin  competition, it tells the story of a boy who discovers a treasure on the beach during the Great Depression. My next novel, Delphic Oracle, U.S.A., takes place across nearly a century in small town Nebraska. Released in 2022 it was the Grand Prize Winner in the CIBA Mark Twain Book Awards competition. The Penny Mansions—a novel set in an Idaho mountain hamlet during the Spanish flu pandemic of 1918—was released in October, 2023, and was a featured selection in Kirkus Reviews. On April 20, 2024 it received a first place ribbon in the 2023 CIBA Mark Twain Book Competition. 

I reside in Portland, Oregon with my wife, Pam, where I am hard, albeit somewhat indecisively, at work on two new novels. I can order beer in four languages. Pam can say, “Pay no attention to this man” in five.a