Poet I Am. Am a Poet I. Love words and windows open. Seize. Daze. Cause. Effect. 

Nurtured inside an imagiNation all my own. Kept where slept short secret poems. Beneath shin guards and socks top drawer in home. Inspired by street signs and Shel Silverstein lines. MAD mags to milk cartons–joke books to juice boxes. At first too shy to share what I wrote. Acted out other people’s words. Moment I began performing my own poems and stories my world and mind expanded.

I’ve been a full-time poet with the Mayhem Poets for the past eight years; an actor appearing in commercials, shorts and plays; a writer of stories, books and sonnets; and a teacher of all ages and inclinations.

Both my parents were teachers. My father, a successful coach and elementary P.E. Teacher with the utmost of integrity. My mom taught ESL, treating her students with the same care and attention as her family. ”All I ask is for her to see my 31 years of motion with some notion she will infinitely wink from the stars when I become one.”

I initially cut my performance teeth on summer-camp theater productions (coincidentally as the Dentist in Little Shop of Horrors) and high school musicals (Damn Yankees and 42nd Street), splitting my time between athletics and the arts. An ex-soccer star, Middlesex County winning high-jumper and USY State champion basketball player (affectionately knows as JEW BALL),

I pledged the Sigma Chi Fraternity in the fall of 1999 remaining active in sports intramurals and community service projects. An unfortunate injury to my left knee while dunking a basketball (it went in) I was forced to stop playing sports competitively following arthroscopic surgery on a shattered meniscus. I instead began to focus on my studies (at Rutgers University) where I double majored in Theater and Journalism with a minor in English.

While at Rutgers I was selected as RCPC chairperson of the year by my college programming council, in addition to starting the longest running on campus open-mic, Verbal Mayhem.

After graduation, I co-created Mayhem Poets, than later moved to New York but began to spend more and more time on the road performing and conducting workshops in schools, colleges and theaters around the world.

As an actor I’ve starred in a few independent movies, shot a commercial for  FIAT, TIME WARNER CABLE, GREAT VALUE VACATIONS,  MTS CELLPHONES, and I have performed plays in both the Midtown International Theater Festival (2009) and NYC Fringe Festival (2007) and was featured on CNN’s i-Report for BARACKSPLOITATION, A Letter to President Obama, which received 20,000 hits in under a week’s time.

In 2006, my group, the Mayhem Poets, appeared on the Today Show winning the Microsoft Idea Wins Challenge for best small business idea, allowing us to fund a new program in New York City called Slam-chops. From 2007-2008 I served as Creative Director of SlamChops, and was responsible for recruiting and training new artists, committed to creating artistically fulfilling, financially beneficial opportunities for all poets/performers, restoring “poet” as a legitimate profession among the masses.

My first solo spoken-word CD is a collection of live and in-studio poems, entitled Crossing Roads Less Travelled (2003), available on iTunes. With the Mayhem Poets I’ve released two CDs, the kid-friendly Eat Your Words (2005), and the critically acclaimed adults-only Reverse Birth, which was selected as one of the “Best Spoken Word CDs of 2007,” by About.com.

Currently I am working on a novel loosely based on my touring experiences throughout elementary and middle schools around the world, touring with the Mayhem Poets, teaching in and around NYC and am continually interested in collaborating with dancers, musicians and other artists.