My Bio
I was born in Chicago, but we lived nearby in Indiana in a beautiful place right on Lake Michigan called Ogden Dunes – “we” being my parents, my older sister Paula and my younger sister Carolyn. When I was four, we moved to Delaware because my dad, Ed, got a better job at a steel mill there. My mom, Nan, was a junior high English teacher, but not at the school I attended. That would have been too weird. We lived in Delaware in various houses – including a house that backed up on a graveyard – until I was fourteen. Then we moved to Birmingham, Alabama when my dad, yup, got a better job at a steel mill there.
Moving at fourteen stunk. Paula was already in college so she didn’t have to move, but Carolyn and I did, and left all our friends behind. Luckily, we landed at two amazing schools – first the Alabama School of Fine Arts where we both studied music. Then we attended Indian Springs School, a school you would definitely recognize if you’ve read John Green’s award-winning young adult novel Looking for Alaska.
After I graduated from Indian Springs, I went back to Chicago to attend Northwestern University as a theatre major, and this is where the writing began. While at Northwestern, I wrote a play that was produced by the theatre department and went all the way through the American College Theatre Festival to receive a performance at the Kennedy Center in Washington D.C. A total thrill.
When I finished college, I continued to live in Chicago and write plays, and started a playwrights’ theatre company called Chicago New Plays. But working about fifty jobs, plus writing, plus running a theatre company burned me out, so I left Chicago, moved to New York and got my first major professional play production in....London! It’s a play called HOLY DAYS and all these years later, I still love it when theatre companies and colleges contact me to tell me they’re doing the play.
Following the success of HOLY DAYS, I wrote other plays that were produced across the United States and throughout the English speaking world. And then I started working in television on the NBC TV show Law & Order. I moved to Los Angeles, wrote a bunch of other TV shows, but here’s the thing – I’d always wanted to write a book. So, during some down time, I did. And, as of July 2006, you can buy my book – “The Heights, the Depths and Everything in Between.” Knopf graciously offered to publish it and put it out there in the world so you could read it. So now I’ll write another. And I’ll keep writing TV too. And plays. Because when people ask me if I’m a playwright or screenwriter or a novelist, I can honestly say that no, I’m just a writer, and that’s all I’ve ever wanted to be.