"Let your life speak."

--Quaker saying

Your faithful correspondent as bangs-inflicted child (above) and today, in more tousled times (below).

ABOUT

Born this way...

...in Southern California, to resolutely bohemian parents (an actress and an actor-turned-photographer), frequently with no fixed address. Education erratic, sometimes self-pursued in public libraries. Struck out on my own at fifteen. Unskilled laborer, then late-night disc jockey, then freelance writer and editor for alternative newsweeklies.

After a belated college degree (University of California, Santa Cruz), moved to New York, served as editor-in-chief of a nonprofit news service and wrote for the Village Voice and other publications. Also taught myself computer programming, and wrote a series of well-received textbooks on the subject.

In 1994 I founded what became Learn2.com, one of the first concerns to specialize in the Internet as an educational medium. The company grew into a popular destination on the web, and eventually a NASDAQ-listed corporation. Five years later, shortly after Yahoo named Learn2 "one of the twelve most important websites of the 20th century," I relinquished the CEO position, phased myself out of the company and returned to writing as a full-time profession.

In 2005 I was the inaugural winner of the Van Zorn Prize for fiction "in the tradition of Edgar Allen Poe" by an emerging writer, an award founded and judged by Michael Chabon. In 2006 my narrative nonfiction book A Sense of the World was a finalist for the National Book Critics Circle Award, longlisted for the international Guardian First Book Award, and named a Best Book of the Year by the Washington Post, the San Francisco Chronicle, Kirkus Reviews and several other publications. In 2007 I'm working on both fiction (a novel) and nonfiction (another narrative work). I suspect the latter will hit the shelves first.

My work has appeared in McSweeney's, The Believer and the San Francisco Chronicle, among other publications. I've been involved with the educational nonprofit 826 Valencia since its earliest days, and have lately guest lectured at Stanford, San Francisco State University and California College of the Arts.

My office is in the San Francisco Writers' Grotto, a unique collective workspace for authors, journalists, filmmakers and other narrative artists. My home is in Marin County, California, where I live with my wife and our two young children.

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