Having won prestigious literary competitions in both grade school and junior high, I attended college with a Scripps Howard Foundation scholarship, earned a BA in Journalism, and interned at Entertainment Tonight. 
After graduation, I worked as a personal assistant in Celebrityville for Susanna Hoffs, Isabelle Adjani, Sally Hershberger, Adam Horowitz, and others. I also had a couple of screenplays ‘in development,’ but stumbled into a writer’s block. My professional pursuit thusly got sidetracked by an extracurricular interest in music which somehow turned into an incredibly varied career working in almost every area of the music industry over the course of 20 years.
In the very early ’90s, I co-represented a cool band (Sun 60) and teamed up with Donovan Leitch to host hipster musicians at Bar One and Roxbury (Beastie Boys, Mazzy Star, Dada, et al). In the fall of 1992, I switched gears, became a vegan, and spent a year at Virgin Records coordinating contracts for newbie artists who later became quite popular (Ben Harper, The Wallflowers, David Gray). In 1994, desperately missing the trenches of live music, I started booking Genghis Cohen, a small acoustic venue where I supported the burgeoning careers of Vonda Shepard, Shawn Mullins, Jill Sobule, and other soon-to-be notables. Joni Mitchell, the Murmurs, and the Bangles even came by sometimes, and that era of the club was immortalized in both Shawn’s hit “Lullaby” and Vonda’s “Maryland.”
My time at Genghis led to a few years managing Vonda’s career, including coordinating her first-ever solo tours and making the record (It’s Good, Eve) that landed her the Ally McBeal gig. I then supervised the music for two independent films (both showcased at the 1997 Sundance Film Festival), and booked and traveled with Melissa Ferrick for several national tours.
Somewhere in there, I got back to my roots, combined my loves of music and writing, and became a freelance ‘expert’ for AllMusic.com before joining the Velvetpark magazine upstarts. Upon the slimming down of Vp after over five years in print, I started blogging and copy editing for Showtime’s The L Word spin-off, OurChart.com, covering environmentalism, music, and politics/current events — three of my main passions. When OC lost its groove in late 2008, we revved the Vp engines back up and I was on board as Senior Editor, as well as doing regular SEO writing for Oak Web Works’ various sites and contributing occasionally to Gather. As of 2011, I’m freelancing as an editor and writer for Shareable and contributing to the NoiseTrade blog.
Along the way, I kept my music ties knotted as a project manager for independent artists (Vonda Shepard, The Coal Men, Korby Lenker, et al) and as a marketing consultant to non-profits producing benefit concerts (Worth Our Weight) and compilation albums (Honor the Earth, Ella Baker Center, Astraea Lesbian Foundation for Justice).
I also took some time (twice) to live, study, and work at the Siddha Yoga Meditation ashram in the Catskills — my fourth passion. While there, I worked in the music, audio, and communications departments coordinating teams for both in-house events and global satellite broadcasts.
In 2009, my environmental activism got the better of me and I decided to do more than write about terra firma. So, I undertook a six-month, hands-on adventure to learn more about organic farming — sustainable agriculture and socially conscious living having become something of a life’s calling for me. Now, I’m putting my money where my mouth is, as it were, and striving to be a vegetarian/vegan/raw food chef specializing in organic, gluten-free, sugar-free world cuisine and soul food. You see, somewhere along my journey, I realized that food sits at the intersection of all my deepest passions — social, spiritual, political, cultural, physiological, environmental, etc. Food is the fuel for every fire.
I’ve lived in all four ‘lower 48′ time zones, wandering and wondering as I feel the call, 
and last year made my ninth cross-country move back to California with my little stripey dog, Jalla. My latest adventure — buying an old motorhome to live in — frees me up to do a lot more volunteer work, as well as spend time learning and working on farms up and down the West Coast. After all, home is where the dog is… or something like that.
My heroes and inspirations include Lao Tzu, Mohandas K. Gandhi, Howard Zinn, Alice Waters, Swami Chidvilasananda, Michael Pollan, Huston Smith, Alice Walker, Kahlil Gibran, Amy Ray, Amy Goodman, Bill Moyers, Dr. Martin Luther King Jr., Dr. Vandana Shiva, Ellen DeGeneres, Swami Muktananda, Jimmy Carter, Rosa Parks, Noam Chomsky, Rachel Maddow, Che Guevara, k.d. lang, J.D. Salinger, Black Elk, Naomi Klein, Jallaludin Rumi, Raymond Carver, Rainer Maria Rilke, Shankara, Nusrat Fateh Ali Khan, Nelson Mandela, and A.A. Milne, among others and in no particular order.
Here’s my actual CV.
You can also see what various readers and eaters think of my work.
