I was born in New York City and have spent most of my life there except for a 10 year stint (age 4 to 14) in Connecticut.
After receiving a BA and MA from NYU (philosophy, English, American Studies), I joined IBM in 1965 as a programmer when
the profession was almost unknown. While working for IBM, as a personal project, I wrote one of the first poetry generating
programs and published the results in Avant Guarde magazine and in the Doubleday anthology Quickly Aging Here. After IBM, I
ran my own software company for 3 years, and then spent a decade as a management consultant with Booz Allen &
Hamilton and 8 more years with my own 2 man consulting firm.
In 1988, I quit business after 23 years and started writing. It wasn't planned or anticipated; it just happened. To date,
I have published around 60 pieces, most of them stories, in venues such as The North American Review (8 times), The Gettysburg
Review (3 times), The Utne Reader, The Literary Review, Other Voices, Descant, Stirring, The Quarterly, and numerous other magazines. My work
has been twice nominated for a Pushcart Prize, broadcast on NPR's Selected Shorts, and performed by Speaking Of Stories. I have been
included in the Norton anthologies Flash Fiction and Flash Fiction Forward, the Great Books Foundation Short Story Omnibus, in Best
of Crosscurrents, and in the teaching texts, Reasoning and Writing Well (McGraw-Hill) and Fast Fiction (Story Press). My story
collection, Injuries and Damages, was short listed for the Iowa Short Fiction prize.
I have taught writing workshops at The Writer's Voice, West Side YMCA, The New School, and the Manhattan JCC, and worked one-on-one
with writers editing individual manuscripts. I have also reviewed books for Kirkus Reviews.
Along the way, I got married and divorced. I currently live in Manhattan with a delightful lawyer named Judy and a grey tomcat named
Wilson, rumored to be a Russian Blue. (The cat in the picture is clearly not Wilson — it is my dear departed McGuane.)
