I retired in 2019 after 38 years of teaching journalism, environmental studies, and Native American Studies at the University of Nebraska at Omaha. About half of my employment time was set aside for writing and editing as part of several endowed professorships I held sequentially between 1990 and 2018. After 2000, climate change (global warming) became my lead focus because of the urgency of the issue and the fact that it affects everyone on Earth. As of 2023, I have written and published 56 books, with about one-third of them on global warming. I have had an intense interest in weather and climate all my life.

Even though I’m from humid DC, I’ve been drawn to the desert since I first set foot there as a kid on a family road trip. Now, I’m lucky enough to live in Utah, home to some of the world’s most legendary desert landscapes. One reason I love the desert is the otherworldly scenery: uncanny arches, bizarre hoodoos, and sand dunes you could disappear into. Before your eyes, layers of geologic time unfold in epochs. The desert is a great place for contemplating the past and future—and for great adventures, with endless sandstone walls to climb, slick rock to bike, and sagebrush-lined trails to hike.

I've been captivated with legends of witches, vampires, faeries, fae, and most magical beings since childhood. Studied and wrote about them with a mysterious twist most of my life. I spent eighteen years as a paralegal in a criminal law firm. Also animal and wildlife rescue is my passion. Working with sanctuaries gives you an up close and personal understanding of why these institutions are necessary. The first book in my second series, A Witch’s Journey, documents a witch who is passionate about animal rescue, and her efforts to build a sanctuary on her family’s enchanted land with the help of her family, friends, and a former Navy SEAL.

I was a computer programmer (BA and MA in math) for several organizations, including NASA and the Savannah River Ecology Lab before retirement, went to the Clarion and Tulane SF&F Workshops, and read the slush pile for Amazing/Fantastic. I’ve done a lot of theatre as actor and lighting tech, have always liked to hike in the woods, have written 11 novels (including 3 published SF novels), had 5 plays given full production, and have 2 CDs of my original songs. In my copious spare time, I sleep.

As a former journalist-turned-lawyer and a recovering news junky, I’ve spent much of my life watching unhappy scenarios play out. But what’s always astonished me me is how, no matter how bad things get or how difficult the situation, there’s a spark of humanity, of kindness and compassion and optimism, that comes out in people at the most unexpected of times. Now, as an author and a parent, I find myself drawn to stories that remind me of that—that no matter how bleak life may look, how cruel or arbitrary the circumstances, there’s something good and beautiful and worth fighting for, not “somewhere out there,” but inside us. 

I’m a piano technician who’s had the incredible fortune of getting to know and work for just about all my childhood heroes. I’m also a recording artist who’s produced several recordings that have made it into the Billboard Top 20, had two PBS specials, and whose music has been streamed over 75 million times around the globe. At the beginning of the pandemic, I began putting pen to paper to share some of the extraordinary experiences I’ve had with music icons and how being in that jet stream helped me tune in to my mission as an artist. 

Before I started writing, my understanding of war largely came about through its manifestation over subsequent decades in individuals. My grandfather selectively shared stories from his time as a bomber, then as a POW in Germany. Maybe it was this conjunction, a personal sense of rebuilding and of storytelling, that has driven my interest in the subject over these years, as a journalist and critic and then as an author of a book on the subject.

I grew up on a small Nebraska farm where a grove of trees was a vast forest, a cow pasture was an endless desert, and a corn cob pile was the tallest mountain in the world. Our horse barn doubled as a castle and fortress for fighting every evil bad guy—including aliens from outer space. I was mortally wounded dozens of times, conducted my first wedding in a grain bin-cathedral at age eight, and read every book our country school could borrow. In college I majored in sociology, minored in history, and receive a Master of Divinity in seminary. My reading list reflects my love of adventurous variety.

I am, and always have been, stimulated by a spiritual connection to my world beyond the laws of physics and men. My hiking, climbing, and trail running have taken me to breathless places imbued with auras and presences I don’t understand but readily accept. And I am filled with the same spirituality when performing or listening to music. I have no ego to shun that which I don’t understand, for I know there is so much beyond me. Some authors describe this intangible better than others in their stories; I hope I am among the former.

As a leader of mountaineering and field science programs, I learned that Mother Earth knows a thing or two about magic. When I see the magic of nature under attack, I have the same response as when witnessing a helpless person being bullied: I want to join the fight. As a writer, my most powerful weapons are my words. And the best use of my words is in the telling of riveting stories—that both entertain and educate—in defense of the wild.