Writing About Lives

A very generous professor in Columbia’s MFA program told me she thought I had something with this “black guy in Utah story.” Armed with her belief in the idea, I spent a month in the summer of 2006, ten years after I had left The Salt Lake Tribune, and researched and wrote on my time as a young journalist in Utah. The first draft was eviscerated in workshop.  I dropped it as a book idea but pursued it as “A Dash of Pepper in the Snow,” over the years. For years I submitted this essay to literary magazines and contests with no result. An editor I trusted dismissed the idea as a list of gripes. In the summer of 2009 I sent it to a little-known creative writing competition called Soul-Making Literary Contest in San Francisco, really almost as a last ditch effort. It won second place in the intercultural category, selected by Tara Masih. I flew to the west coast and gave a reading at the San Francisco Public Library. A bunch of my friends showed up. That was in the spring of 2010.

Almost two years later, thanks to the tireless efforts and faith of  Tara Masih, who convinced a publishing house to run with a collection of essays from relatively unknown writers from various cultural backgrounds. The Chalk Circle: Prizewinning Intercultural Essays will come out next summer with Wyyatt-MacKenzie Publishing. I’ve published a lot of work in newspapers, magazines and online. This becomes my first full chapter post-newspapers.

Cheers!