About Me I teach English at St Margaret's Episcopal School in San Juan Capistrano, California. I'm also the English department chair. I've been at SMES since the fall of 1997. Currently I teach only seniors I grew up in southern Illinois, where my family was involved in the lumber business. My father is a civil engineer who owned and operated a construction business, and my mother was a high school teacher. I graduated from Yale with a degree in English in 1985, and received a Master's in English and Comparative Literature from Columbia in 1986. From 1986-1991 I taught English at The Montgomery Academy, a private school in Alabama. In 1991 I enrolled in the University of Iowa, studying a hybrid mix of American literature, history, film, TV, music, and cultural theory. I received a second Master's degree, this time in American Studies, from Iowa in 1995. My wife Beth and I married in 1988, and we have one son, George, who was born in 1993. We also have an English Springer Spaniel, Luke, and a cat, Gimli.