Writer + Art Director

Bad News Bears (1976) is a movie about a little league team who siphoned all of their diversity and individual oddities to merge into an unstoppable force, becoming good enough to finish the season…in second place.

And I’ve been chasing that high of a ragtag group of misfits ever since I first watched the movie (and basically every sports movie) back in the 80s. It matriculated into my fiction and narrative poetry (once I started writing for real at Ball State University – Class of 2001), as a Creative Writing undergrad.

I love stories about nontraditional families. My parents weren’t married, weren’t together for the majority of my life, but loved each other like a married couple. For me that was normal. And as a young black kid, I grew up knowing how nontraditional my existence was for some and how even atypical it was within the Black community itself.

My fiction and the best of my journalism tell stories of the marginalized. History and the surrealism embedded in it, most times, are my anchors.

Since I couldn’t make a living writing poetry, I delved into journalism, first writing film reviews (he minored in Film Studies), then as a newspaper and magazine man, working locally in Fort Wayne, Indiana and nationally for Ebony.com and Indian Country Today. My natural eye for composition (and thinking like a writer) led to a photography career.

A big part of my writing and photography is juxtaposition-ing. What two things look good next to each other? What word combinations make the best turns of phrase? How do you frame those stories? If you understand the context, you’ll know where to put the camera.

Another facet is my work is the relationship between rhythm, performance, and editing. My writing has always been lyrical and that carries over into other areas of my work.

I own Scrambled Eggs LLC so I can collaborate with folks smarter than myself to make things I want to read, watch, and wear. I love Toni Morrison and Grant Morrison, in no particular order.

Press

WBOI NPR News and Diverse Music 2018: PRESS

Fortitude Fund: PRESS1

WBOI Presents: PRESS2

Journal Gazette 5 Questions: PRESS3

Input Fort Wayne 5 Fort Wayne Writers: PRESS4

ShoutOut LA 2021: PRESS5

Awards

Silver Award Collateral Material: Publication Design for Brown v. Board of Education Comic Booklet American Advertising Federation (AAF) Fort Wayne 2021

Gold Award Elements of Advertising: Illustration for “Dare Cycle” Concept Art American Advertising Federation (AAF) Fort Wayne 2022