We moved around a lot, finally settled in Chicagoland. Catholic school. Divorces, remarriages, plenty of stepsiblings. French major in Cornell U, a semi-terrified year in Paris. Started a PhD progam in French Lit at Yale, defected to the Yale School of Drama and eventually got my doctorate in Dramaturgy and Dramatic Criticism, which was published as Three French Comedies by Yale University Press. Wrote theater criticism for The Village Voice, American Theatre, and Yale Theatre. Worked in regional theatres as a Literary Manager/Dramaturg for about fifteen years. My interests in French Lit and musical theatre combined in 1997, when I wrote the book for the ill-starred Broadway musical Triumph of Love. I began writing short plays in 1998 and short fiction in 2002. The plays have been produced and mostly published, and I've had stories appear in Bloom, The Gettysburg Review, The Harrington Gay Men's Fiction Quarterly, Subtropics, and the anthology Boy Crazy. My debut novel, Sugarless, is coming out this October from University of Wisconsin Press. Early influences: The board game Clue. The Hardy Boys. Thornton W. Burgess' Mother West Wind tales. The Good Earth. Stephen Sondheim. Wouk's City Boy, or The Adventures of Herbie Bookbinder. S.J. Perelman. The movies Badlands, Midnight Cowboy, Some Like it Hot, and Entre Nous. Austen. Cheever. The plays of Noel Coward. Later influences: Stendhal. Forster. Mann. "Why I Live at the P.O." Flannery O'Connor. Wharton. Flaubert. James Purdy. Mapp & Lucia.  A Confederacy of Dunces, Our Town, The Good Soldier, The Cherry Orchard, Revolutionary Road, Their Eyes Were Watching God. Recent influences: William Maxwell. Conrad. Cather. 69 Love Songs. Enough already, right?      

My dissertation, Three French Comedies, was chosen an "Outstanding Literary Translation of the Year" by the American Literary Translators Association.