Bio

I was born in Lincoln, Nebraska, and raised in a small town a few hours north of there. It was the 80s. Our president was an actor (some things never change), and I had a flat top and several pink shirts. By the end of the decade, The Germans were taking sledgehammers to concrete walls, Chinese students were standing up to tanks, and my parents and I were packing up all of our belongings to move to Budapest, Hungary.

They put me right into a Hungarian public school straight away. I didn't speak the language at all, so for 8 hours a day I sat and read (lots of Hardy Boys and spy novels). When I got bored with reading, I would write. I had notebooks full of long epic stories about me kissing girls and escaping from the bad guys who did not want me to kiss the girls. Unfortunately, most of these notebooks are still intact. I eventually picked up Hungarian, and was taking on a full course load and speaking fluently before we moved back to the states in 1997.

I finished high school and decided to go to the University of Nebraska Lincoln where, as a full-time nerd, I devoted my life to discovering just how little fun someone can have while attending a college (just kidding...sort of). I helped found a writers group at the University called Saint Zero (since disbanded), and dabbled in journalism where I won a few awards for some opinion columns I wrote. I made some good friends, and caused a small amount of ruckus on my way through UNL.

[Tangent: I bought my first LP my sophomore year of college. It was a horrible techno record, which I sold to a dude who never paid me for it. In spite of this rocky beginning, thus began the vinyl addiction that is slowly taking over my life.]

Before I got my degree, I did a bunch of undergraduate thesis research on "Literacy vs. Orality" (basically, the difference between reading and listening). That was when I first heard about Slam Poetry--this aural art form that was supposedly taking the nation by storm. Even after visiting the National Poetry Slam in 2004, I didn't really feel like this was something I would ever want to do. I just enjoyed listening.

This thing just goes on forever, doesn't it?

I graduated with a BA in Writing and Rhetoric (i.e. arguing) and immediately flung myself into a miserable career at a publishing company where I slowly moved up the chain and became an Assistant Editor. I was selling my soul one paycheck at a time and generally running headlong into what Thoreau would have called a lifetime of "quiet desperation," when, on one fateful evening, I saw an old friend at a coffee shop. He (Dan Leamen) asked me to come to a slam, and I did. Simple as that.

I was really impressed with the opportunity writers were given to connect with their audience and the energy that happened there. Dan convinced me to slam the next month, and thus was born one of the more notorious slam poetry duos around. Dan and I still regularly workshop and perform together.

I decided to become a teacher, so I went back to school. I'm a year away from my first job as a teacher (as I write this), and very much looking forward to a meaningful career as an educator. I also helped start (and currently run) a slam in Lincoln, Nebraska. If you want, you can come visit me there. I'm real friendly. Honest.

I suppose that's as good of a place as any to stop.