Stephen Kogon was born and raised in Maryland, growing up primarily in the city of Columbia, where he first began to exercise his imagination by spending many hours alone in his room creating new worlds and characters. While his parents feared he might be a tad abnormal, little did they know that the seeds of a storyteller were instead being grown. He would, however, occasionally leave the room to put on a show of some sort, enlisting his younger sister to play a role, as they entertained his parents and older brother. After high school, where the experience of Geometry and Algebra II nearly drained him of all creative initiative, he went off to college at the University of Maryland at Baltimore County (UMBC). It was there that he re-discovered his passion for entertaining as he wrote and acted in comedy sketches for the campus TV show. Upon graduating, he moved to Los Angeles to pursue writing and acting. Within a year, he landed a featured role in an episode of Lifetime’s “Crimes and Confessions,” playing a pasty-faced twerp. After getting a tan, he decided to concentrate on screenwriting, whereupon one of his scripts, “The Fells Point Five,” made the semifinals of the prestigious Nicholl Fellowship Screenwriting Competition. Over the next few years, he had several scripts optioned by prominent producers, including Roger Paradiso (“The Thomas Crown Affair”) and Jennie Lew Tugend (“Free Willy”). Finally, he wrote his first novel, “Max Mooth – Cyber Sleuth and the Case of the Zombie Virus” and writes a popular web comic strip (and now cartoon) called STUDIO READER STAN, which satirizes the entertainment industry from the perspective of a lowly screenplay reader.