Biography

For the past decade, I have worked as an independent journalist and writer, penning articles, speeches, press releases, white papers and marketing materials for a long list of local, national and international publications and clients elsewhere mentioned on this site.

Before my status as an independent writer, I managed to graduate with two degrees from the University of Wisconsin, intern with the investigative reporter Jack Anderson and work for newspapers in Ocean City and Montgomery County, Maryland. I spent more than three years at the Savannah Morning News and Evening Press in the mid-to-late 1980s, serving as a general assignment reporter, feature writer, occasional cop reporter and weekly music columnist.

After nearly four years in Savannah, I got the break of my career and won a Fulbright scholarship to teach at Punjab University in Lahore, Pakistan. It was an amazing adventure. After four months in Lahore I took a position as an “advisor” to the Afghan Media Resource Center in Peshawar, Pakistan, where I worked for six months as an editor and instructor during the Soviet withdrawal from Afghanistan.

Returning to the United States, I found a job as program director at the World Press Institute at Macalester College in St. Paul. In that position I planned a five month long program — from late June to early November — for 10 foreign journalists visiting from 10 different countries. The program included visits to 20 American small and large cities and interviews with more than 300 people and institutions. In addition, I developed two new programs for the institute.

Following three years in that position I once again was chosen for a Fulbright, this time in Albania, where I taught at Tirana University in Tirana, the nation’s capital. When I returned this time, I decided to stay in St. Paul, get married and settle down. While I have worked part-time since then at a college and a national trade magazine, I have remained happily self-employed.

I live with my family — two children, a soulmate named Judy and an unfriendly cat — in St. Paul and remain active in my community, serving as co-chair of the Sprawl Committee at the Sierra Club and as a volunteer for Big Brothers/Big Sisters and Highland Park Elementary School.