I was born and raised in northern New Jersey, up in one of those corners where the name “Garden State” isn’t just ironic. In high school, I built sets and ran the sound board for the drama club and edited the literary magazine. After high school, I went to Harvard, where I studied child psychology and tinkered around with computer programming and web design. I graduated in 1998 with a degree in psychology and worked for two years in computer security; in the summer of 2000, I moved to California and started graduate school in history at the University of California, Berkeley. After coming to California, I became involved with a science fiction magazine called Strange Horizons, where I was editor-in-chief until the fall of 2010. I finished my doctoral program in 2006, and spent a couple of years teaching in the history department at Berkeley before moving to Brooklyn in 2008.
These days, I’m teaching history at an independent high school in New York City, which presents a whole new set of rewards (and challenges) after so many years at Berkeley. When you add in the work that I do with Strange Horizons, I don’t have a whole lot of free time, but I still manage to find time to entertain myself. (These days, entertaining myself seems to involve computer games, making quilts, and/or watching crime dramas on television. I’m not proud of the crime dramas, but they’re oddly satisfying.)