Born on the wrong side of life, I learned to make myself invisible, to be so quiet that no one noticed me in the shadows. My illiterate grandfather, and nearly illiterate grandmother valued books and education; consequently, they coaxed a Carnegie Librarian to teach me to read and write by age six. When I was nine years old, my grandfather was murdered; the killer never apprehended. Writing allowed me to deal with my anger and grief by changing the ending of that particular reality: I wrote murder stories.
I published my first poem and my first journalistic articles around the age of fourteen. It was a time of countrywide unrest and riots. After that, I never stopped writing--poems, articles, short stories, novels. Good Intentions (first edition), a literary novel, received the Alice B. Reader Award for Excellence in 2002. Sketch of a Murder and Street Harvest have made Amazon's Top 100 Bestseller's Lists several times.
I published my first poem and my first journalistic articles around the age of fourteen. It was a time of countrywide unrest and riots. After that, I never stopped writing--poems, articles, short stories, novels. Good Intentions (first edition), a literary novel, received the Alice B. Reader Award for Excellence in 2002. Sketch of a Murder and Street Harvest have made Amazon's Top 100 Bestseller's Lists several times.
