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was born on the banks of the Yazoo River in Leflore County, Mississippi, which is not quite as prosaic as it sounds because that is simply where the Greenwood-Leflore County Hospital is located, right on the riverbank on the west side of Greenwood.

The Delta is an area of remorsely flat land in northwest Mississippi. It is shaped somewhat like a spearhead with one end at Memphis, Tennessee, and the other at Vicksburg and is roughly 200 miles long and 87 miles across at its  widest point. The Delta is actually an alluvial floodplain encompassed by the Mississippi River to the west and the Yazoo River to the east totaling nealy 7,000 square miles of some of the best land in the world for growing cotton.

Cotton Field

The Delta is brutally hot in the summer, cold in the winter, and humid all year round. It is a land of great wealth and heartbreaking poverty existing side by side. It is a polyglot of races and cultures that somehow manage to get along with each other a little more often than not. It is a place filled with warm friendly, open-handed people capable of deep, fierce, sometimes violent passions. It is where the Blues were born.

Our family lived in Greenwood until I was eight years old when we left the Mississippi Delta for the Hill Country of northeast Mississippi and a little town called Tupelo.

But that was not the end of my time in the Delta.
My father was from a familiy of eight, my mother from a family of ten. I had aunts, uncles, and cousins the length and breadth of the Delta. Both of my grandfathers and many of my uncles were cotton planters. We spent a lot of time in the Delta visiting family. 

In addition to all of our family visits, I spent many of my childhood summers with my father's parents on a small farm 2 1/2 miles north of Brazil in Tallahatchie County. These visits continued well into my high school years.
These two wonderful and indulgent grandparents, both born of the 19th century, were willing to tell and retell old, old stories, family tales, and stories that touched on every admirable, as well as base, human trait. I was a sponge absorbing all of them that I could.

My formal education veered from engineering to studio art to religion to philosophy and back to religion, all of which oddly enough led me to a career in Information Technology.

Always an avid reader, I wrote occasionally for my own pleasure, and one year as a Christmas gift for my young nieces, I wrote, illustrated, and had printed a short memoir about my dog Scrappy and life on my grandparents’ farm during my

childhood.

That little book proved to be so popular with family and friends (admittedly not the harshest of critics), that after over 30 years in IT and with the support of my wife Sherrie, I turned my back on the corporate world to devote myself to writing.

And that opened the
floodgates. At this point, I have completed two volumes of memoirs, three novels, one novella, and a collection of outdoor adventures. I am also plotting out two more novels and expandeing the novella into a novel.

And of course, I still read. Ever since I could make sense out of a page of text, I have taken to heart William Faulkner's advice to "Read, read, read. Read everything - trash, classics, good and bad, and see how they do it". And although I read everything from Edgar Rice Burroughs and Isaac Asimov to Lee Child and Ian Fleming, from natural history to military history, from biography to cosmology, from Tolstoy to Melville to Twain, my very favorite authors, the ones I go back to time and again, are Faulkner, Cormac McCarthy, Charles Frazier, and Patrick O'Brian. Lately I have been reading a lot of Lin Enger, Jeffery Lent, and Donna Tartt. And I must admit that Thomas Pynchon continues to grow on me.

When Sherrie and I married, I gained not just a wonderful wife but an instant family in her outstanding young, teenaged twin sons. They are both grown and married now with children of their own. Sherrie and I have made our home in North Carolina since 1998.



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