BIO

I was born in 1967 and grew up on North Mozart Street in Chicago’s West Rogers Park neighborhood, once home to Burghard's Egg Factory, Roband's Drugstore, and the Starsky & Fudge ice cream parlor. My early childhood was spent listening to Miss Kaufmann read stories at Nortown Public Library, learning to draw and color in Miss O'Connor's kindergarten class at Boone Elementary, walking along Lunt Avenue Beach with my mother. I finally left Chicago in 1984 to attend Vassar College, but returned in 1988 and worked for a little over a decade as an editor, nonfiction author, playwright, theater director, and very occasional film producer. I got a Master’s degree in English Lit at UIC,  wrote for a number of periodicals, especially the Chicago Reader. In 2000, I won a fellowship to Columbia University’s National Arts Journalism Program and thought I would write a nonfiction book about the uncomfortable relationship between arts and the corporate world. The working title was For a Few Dollars More. Instead, I wound up writing fiction and remaining in New York where I served as senior editor of Book Magazine until that publication folded in 2003. My first novel, Crossing California, was published by Riverhead Books in 2004, The Washington Story in August, 2005. My next novel, Ellington Boulevard, was published in March, 2008 by Spiegel & Grau Publishers, a division of Doubleday. After that, I published the memoir My Father's Bonus March and the novels The Thieves of Manhattan, The Salinger Contract and Cyclorama. I currently live in New York where I host the podcast Playing Anne Frank for the Forward. My archives, which include a large number of drafts of novels and plays as well as unpublished works, can be found at the Harold Washington branch of the Chicago Public LIbrary. I also serve as the Forward’s executive editor and am at work on a pair of podcast projects, a nonfiction book, and a new novel — well, three of them, actually.