I was born in the Caribbean. On my mother’s side I’m the third generation of a family that started living aboard boats when my grandfather sailed off down the river Thames in a sailboat with his family aboard to explore the Mediterranean. My biological father’s side of the family hails from Grenada, leaving me a bi-racial Caribbean boy who’s “˜light but not quite white’ and long-proud in his Caribbean roots.

As a child I lived aboard boats while growing up in Grenada, then on boats with various family in the British Virgin Islands, and again in the US Virgin Islands where my family introduced my stepdad to the life.

I moved to Ohio in 1995 for my senior year of high school after a series of hurricanes destroyed the boat we lived on. My stepdad, who grew up in Ohio, moved us up to be with family. After scraping by and barely graduating, I attended a small liberal arts college in the small town of Bluffton, Ohio, and somehow never quite managed to escape the small town.

I fell in love with Science Fiction from a rather young age. I read Arthur C. Clarke and Asimov novels when I was six or seven and became addicted to the high concepts and sense of wonder I found in those books. I was a voracious reader, and high school started spinning stories out due to my inability to pay attention in class. My sophomore year I began completing stories and submitting them to magazines.

Somewhat unimaginatively, I did go to college and get an English degree. More because I was trying to buy time and continue working on my writing. It worked: I started selling short stories my junior year of college while spending as much time skipping class I could without failing out. I attended the well known science fiction and fantasy workshop Clarion during this time as well.

Since 2006 I’ve been a full time author and freelancer. I split my time between working behind the scenes for various blogs as an editor, copy editor, and writer, and also writing novels and short stories.