I was born in Brooklyn, NY on October 15, 1969, to the former Diane Murphy and Bill Loehfelm. At eighteen months, my folks split. My father moved to Manhattan and my mother remained in Brooklyn with me, resuming her career as a grammar school teacher and facing the tough prospect of being a single parent in the early-70’s.

When I was three, my mother married Stephen McDonald. Our new family soon welcomed a second son, Stephen, and moved to Eltingville on the southern end of Staten Island.

Throughout the 70’s and 80’s, two more brothers, John and then Michael, came into my life. With four boys and at least one dog, our house was a bit of a circus, but life was good. I was a Cub Scout, played on a soccer team, went to public school until high school. I went to an all-boys Catholic school where I lived mostly as an outsider with an affinity for writing, comic books, hard rock and punk. I attended writing workshops at the public library and helped restart the school literary magazine.

In 1987, I went away to college at the University of Scranton, where I was a slightly underachieving, good time student. I studied communications, considered both advertising and First Amendment law, before deciding to be a teacher. After graduation in 1991, I started a career teaching high school English on Staten Island. Dying to get off Staten Island, I moved to Sea Bright, NJ, a tiny beach town on the shore that, ironically, was destroyed by a flood in 1992 and rebuilt in 1993. I lived in Jersey and taught on SI until 1997, when I moved to New Orleans.

In New Orleans, I taught for three more years. Summer of ’99, I wrote the first draft of my first novel. The love of writing I knew in high school leapt back to life, and, about to turn thirty, I decided writing was what I needed to be doing. I left teaching, taking a succession of part-time jobs to support myself as I wrote. I attended graduate school at the University of New Orleans, where I met my wife and rediscovered the type of artistic community I had found in those Saturday morning library workshops.

My wife and I graduated UNO, with our MFA and MA respectively, in May 2005. That August, Katrina came. We lived in exile for close to six weeks, returning home three days before my thirty-sixth birthday. I found a new bartending job. My wife, her university teaching career cut off at the knees by Katrina, returned to waiting tables. I went back to work on Fresh Kills, a dark novella I had started expanding over the summer of ’05.

FRESH KILLS was published in hard cover by Penguin/Putnam in late summer 2008 to wide critical acclaim. The trade paperback for FRESH KILLS hit bookstore shelves in July of ‘09, preceding the September hard cover publication, also by Penguin/Putnam, of my second novel BLOODROOT, now available from booksellers everywhere.