Born in New Jersey, college in Boston, spent seven years as a jazz dj in New Orleans, grad school in San Francisco (MA Creative Writing). Since then it's been everything from English teacher to copyeditor for the Federal Reserve Bank of San Francisco (don't ask) to, currently, a freelance writer.

Love my Conrad, Roth, finding books to read at random, jazz, rock, blues, you name it.

Last great reads: Three Paths to the Lake by Ingeborg Bachmann--five terrific short stories by a writer I'd never heard of, but who, it turns out, was an influential Austrian writer in the 1960s. She seems to have died quite young. The stories are extremely haunting tales, all about women trying to fight for their identities in one way or another. I bought this book more or less at random off the shelf of a local Goodwill store.

Dorothy Parker's Elbow--Tattoos on Writers, Writers on Tattoos, anthology of short stories and poems dealing with tattoos and tattooing edited by Kim Addonizio and Cheryl Dumesnil. Here's a review I wrote that appears on the website SFStation: www.sfstation.com/---/dorothy.htm