Ken grew up in Orange County, California, one of ten children in a rambunctious and adventurous family. Like many of the young boys and girls in his neighborhood, he enjoyed playing sports and advancing the ideals of mayhem. After attending Arizona State University, Ken began a tech career in sales and marketing, spending most of those years at a Fortune 50 firm. In his young thirties, he was diagnosed with an aggressive form of multiple sclerosis that profoundly affected his life; twelve years later, he grew wheelchair-bound after an MS-related accident
Needing to reinvent himself, Ken struggled to discover a passion that might provide much-needed purpose and direction. Years earlier, he penned articles for the Hewes Highlander Junior High school paper in Tustin, California. Later, he drafted poems to entertain his high school buddies; one creative missive got him suspended from Foothill High. An English professor at ASU, Ms. Chambers, scribed a note suggesting Ken had “potential” as a writer, a polite way to say he wasn’t receiving an A (that would require attending all his classes), but it was a message he never forgot. After graduating with a business degree, Ken read just one fiction book over the next twenty-five years, stupidly convinced that only non-fiction was worthy of precious idle time.
After his accident, Ken eventually took writing seriously. Though it took him two years to write two pages, he one day forced himself to tell a story using speech-to-text software; those words became the first paragraphs of his memoir and a psychological thriller. His wife often lectured him on staying up too late, a habit affecting his already diminished energy due to his disease. But when people discover their deepest passions, they ask themselves how and why they lived their lives without pursuing them earlier. Thus it was with Ken’s burgeoning writing career. Author Malcolm Gladwell wrote a bestseller arguing that it takes 10,000 hours to achieve mastery of a new field. Ken is unsure if 10,000 or 7000 or 5000 is the correct number, but he agrees it is in the thousands. He considers himself fortunate because he enjoys every step of his author journey.
Eagle Bay, a dark psychological thriller set on the Oregon Coast, its pages chock-full of mystery and duplicity, was released June 1, 2023. The Emerald Cross, a second thriller pitting an ex-Green Beret hero and his female Army Black Hawk comrade against a Mexican drug lord and cartel, will follow in January, 2024. Stand Up, a memoir of disease, family, faith & hope, was Ken’s first book, released in 2018. He is working at a fever pitch to release three books in 2024.
Ken and his artist wife, Karen, are parents to three children who make them proud beyond words, a wonderful daughter-in-law they cherish, a son-in-law and fiancé who treat their daughters as any parent would hope, and a granddaughter who provides indescribable joy. After thirty years in Oregon, the couple now calls Arizona home.
