I was born in Cleveland, Ohio, and studied business and accounting at the University of Dayton, Ohio. After graduating I spent twenty-eight years with an international accounting firm in the US and Japan as a certified public accountant, certified fraud examiner, and certified information systems auditor. During that time, I worked with numerous large and small, local and international organizations and learned firsthand that organizations have a personality that reflects the people in them. I then moved to Auckland, New Zealand, and in 2003 earned an MA in English from the University of Auckland. Since then I have completed post-graduate study in world literatures including Japanese, Korean, and Chinese. My wife, Mahrukh, and I currently divide our time between Auckland and CUE Haven, a fifty-nine acre pastureland north of the city that we restoring to a native New Zealand forest preserve.