The writer was born and raised in southeastern Virginia when there were still some working farms in Warwick County and always and forever the stately James River. As a melancholy teenager, I would of an evening walk the few blocks from my house to old Hilton Pier where the broad, majestic river splashed and drove its rollicking waves into shore, at high tide, and at ebb tide would send gently traveling waves to land like soft promises on the sand.
Some evenings when the sunset would sink toward the river in glorious colors, I waited patiently as its last light disappeared into the dark waters.
Then I would turn to walk back home.
My widowed mother would have dinner almost ready and I would start doing homework.
My teenage melancholy had disappeared as well, but as I left the river I bore another feeling that was far older than I, a sorrow that still tinged the landscape and rivers of Old Virginia.
But at the time, I didn't know much about that.
I did know that my home in Virginia was where the War Between the States had raged. The Peninsula Campaign in southeastern Virginia in 1862 was pretty much in my own backyard. Years later Grant looped a noose around Richmond that ended the War in 1865. Nonetheless, one hundred years later not much about the bloody tragic War was taught to me in school. And so upon graduation from Warwick High in little Warwick County in southeastern Virginia, with scant knowledge of the Great War Between the States, nor how my ancestors fought and perished in that War, and with even less knowledge of what Old Virginia was like in the 17th and 18th centuries when my ancestors lived there, I blithely left Virginia and traveled around.
I lived in New York, D.C., San Francisco, Berkeley, Sausalito, Marin County, Mendocino County, Los Angeles, and streaked across the U.S. in a classic okd Cadillac convertible and rode Amtrak back and forth and across Canada, did a Study Abroad at the Mediterranean Institute at the University of Malta, went on assignment to Abidjan in Cote d'Ivoire, Africa, and traveled to Paris and took Eurail to see a couple of prehistoric painted caves in southern France, Alta Mira cave in northern Spain and the grotto at Lourdes.
Within this span of travel, I also pursued a love of learning and love of stories and story-telling bestowed upon me by my Mother from early childhood on. I received a B.A. Degree in English Literature, Phi Beta Kappa from the University of California at Berkeley; an M.A. Degree in Video Production and Film Studies from American University in Washington D.C.; and a Ph.D., from the College of William and Mary in Virginia in Higher Education and Psychology of Learning with a statistical study on the correlation of emotion and high achievement. I worked at the World Bank in Washington D.C. as Operations Staff Assistant in the Energy Sector Management Assistance Program (ESMAP) which was co-sponsored by the United Nations Development Program (UNDP) and I was also a writer/photographer for Bank's World Magazine, an in-house publication sent to 1,500 staff in Bank missions worldwide. I worked as an intern TV producer for the U.S. Information Agency, WORLDNET-TV, in the Africa Interactives Broadcasts, a two-way audio one-way video live broadcast by satellite to audiences at U.S. Embassies in Africa, presenting experts on economic development. I was photographer and on-camera interviewer for TVTV, an independent video production company in San Francisco, documenting the aftermath of Watergate in Washington, D.C., funded by WNET-TV New York and shown on national PBS. My only claim to fame are two photographs taken at a party in the White House and published with my by-line in NEWSWEEK. Other photos taken by me to publicize the WNET-TVTV documentary were published in The New York Times, The New York Daily News, The New York Post and elsewhere. As I look back on all this, my best memory is dancing a polka in the White House with a giant Marine guard.
Other articles and photographs of mine have been published in Bank's World, The San Francisco Bay Guardian, The Marin Sun, The Times Herald-Daily Press, Blue Note Magazine, San Francisco Magazine, and elsewhere.
While attending my doctoral courses at William and Mary College, and wearing the historical clothing of the 18th century, I worked for The Colonial Williamsburg Foundation as Historical Interpreter in the Book Bindery and occasionally in the adjacent Print Shop. I also worked at CW as Historical Attendant whose job was to unlock the assigned Colonial house or shop and light candles for Evening Programs including for example story-telling and harpsichord and cello recitals. I worked as School and Group Tour Guide for both Colonial Williamsburg Foundation and the Jamestown-Yorktown Foundation. Thanks to historical training by Jamestown-Yorktown, I learned 17th- and 18th-century Virginia history when my ancestors had farmed the land. Colonial Williamsburg training for Interpreters and tour guides was very extensive, conducted from 9 to 5, five days per week for three months. From all of these training sessions conducted on the real historical sites, I acquired a great love of history and the stories and characters of history to be told and re-told with "historical accuracy" - a goal which I took quite seriously in my Interpretations on the sites and for school tours. This experience and these acquired skills fueled the creation of historical characters and battle scenes in my novel, Pinckney's General.
Today after all of the above, I am retired and write. After intensive historical research for this book, and thanks to the Ken Burns Civil War documentary on PBS, plus a wonderful book that got me started on this novel, by Virginia historian Nelson Lankford, called Richmond Burning, and the inspiring history books by Douglas Southall Freeman, Shelby Foote, Stephen Sears, George Walsh, plus historical clarification (of my confusion) by National Park Service guides, and thanks so many online sites, I finally learned when and where my great-grandfather served in Lee's Army of Northern Virginia, and so I wrote this twice-told tale which is a familiar, oft-told tale detailing the battles in which my great-grandfather Pinckney fought, and how he died in early April 1865, so that, for me at last, the sorrow that still tinges the modern landscape of Old Virginia has been explained. (Please note that the Sample Chapter that follows is actually a composit of three short chapters that go together to explain how Pinckney got his promotion.)

“A fine wartime novel that avoids the common landmines of its genre.”
– Kirkus Reviews