I grew up near San Francisco and still consider the Bay Area my spiritual home. I did undergraduate and masters degree work in the Pacific Northwest, and my PhD at the University of California, Santa Cruz. After 30 years of university teaching, I retired in 2017. I devote most of my writing time now to fiction. I have a political mystery novel and a comic novel of academe in progress. In the face of the distastrous and dangerous rise of authoritarianism in the US and elsewhere, I am intensifying my commitment to the progressive social activism that has always been part of my work both online (new materials on the arts of protest coming soon) and offline. I welcome the frequent requests from media to discuss developments in social protest.

My partner of 30 years and I have one child, a son who works in the independent 

video game design field. Our pup, Pepper, a rescue mutt of English Pointer and Labrador retriever descent (we surmise), is now 75lbs --considerably larger than as pictured on the homepage of this site.