MY WRITING STORY

My writing story began with a 35 year career in acting, starting at the age of 10. An early play, Please Hold, about an automated secretary, won a playwrighting competition for high school students. Armed with a BA in Drama from George Mason University (1981), I was active in the Washington DC theatre/film/television scene. I coscripted the films, Dr. Billy Saves DC and Flowers from Albert, which aired on Metrovision TV. Two short plays, The Hamster of Happiness and On a Train Riding into the Night, were produced at the Source Theatre in DC. During the day, I worked as a library technician at the Library of Congress, where I heard many great writers (Coleman Barks reading Rumi, Yvetushenko, Peter Taylor, and Sharon Olds stand out). In 1994, I began studying creative writing in earnest at the Writer's Center of Bethesda where I took classes for ten years. I was fortunate to have Pulitzer Prize winner Henry Taylor as my teacher in poetic forms. The class was called The Answerable Form. My poetry was first published in Red River Review, followed by Gavea-Brown, A Bilingual Journal of Portuguese-American Studies and Letters, The Sow's Ear, The Hiram Review, Poetry Quarterly, and Solo Novo. Gavea-Brown, published out of Brown University, publishes my work on a regular basis. I am included their anthology, The Gavea-Brown Book of Portuguese-American Poets. A lot of my material for Gavea-Brown derives from my father's story as a Portuguese immigrant. In 2009 my poem, Why I Sang at Dinner, was published in Prairie Schooner and subsequently nominated for the 2010 Pushcart Prize. In 2010 The Northern Virginia Review published my story, The Care of Roses, and awarded it their Fiction Prize. My story, Beurre Blanc, a story of cooking and heartbreak, is in the current issue. My chief aim as a writer is to continually publish fiction, poetry, and drama. My current mentor is Anne Becker, poet in residence at the Pyramid Atlantic Arts Center and former Poet Laureate of Takoma Park, Maryland (Yes, Takoma Park has a Poet Laureate).