KIRKUS has described THE LAST SHIPWRECKED SAILOR as "a picaresque in the tradition of Gargantua and Pantagruel, Gulliver's Travels, and The Odyssey."For more information about THE LAST SHIPWRECKED SAILOR, please visit www.lastshipwrecked.com, my website that is dedicated to the 5-novel kindle ebook. I wrote the LAST SHIPWRECKED SAILOR over a 6-year period between 2006-2012. The influences on the book are many: African literature; the folktales of North and South American Indians; the works of Herman Melville; Holocaust literature; the Vietnam war and its aftermath in southeast Asia; the music of Tom Waits, Frank Zappa, and countless others; the legacy of colonialism; the ways in which political leaders sell war to the public.I grew up in St. Petersburg, Florida and have degrees in anthropology from Vanderbilt, the University of Arizona, and the University of Wisconsin. I worked for two decades in the environmental consulting industry, primarily in southern Arizona, until 2009, when I made a mid-life career change and enrolled in law school at the University of Arizona. I'm set to graduate in May 2012 and hope to pursue a career in international human rights law. Of course I also plan to continue to write fiction and poetry.I currently live in Tucson, but have had the privilege of living and working in Japan (2001-2003), where I taught at Tsukuba University, and also conducting archaeological research in Siberia (1995-2000). I have two daughters: Gina, who currently teaches English in Shenzhen, China; and Cassandra, who is an RN in Tucson.