Welcome to my website! My most recent book, Bop Apocalypse: Jazz, Race, the Beats and Drugs (Da Capo Press, January 2017), tells the story of the evolution of jazz, its relationship to the Beat Generation, and how the use of drugs first entered the DNA of modern American popular culture. The book features vivid portraits of jazz icons like Louis Armstrong, Billie Holiday, Lester Young, Charlie Parker, Miles Davis, Charlie Parker, John Coltrane, Jackie McLean and others, cross-cutting their stories with seminal Beat writers and figures like Jack Kerouac, Allen Ginsberg, and William Burroughs. It also includes the never-before published story of Ruby Rosano, a heroin-addicted prostitute and junkie companion of Billie Holiday. At a time when marijuana legalization, an epidemic of fentanyl, and the gross racial disparities of mass incarceration are all hot topics, Bop Apocalypse takes the reader back to the time when the templates of modern drug law, policy, and culture were first established, along with the concomitant racial stereotypes--back to the time when the whole culture war over the use of drugs in America first began. I envisioned the book as a living history that would read like a novel, about a time that teaches us much about the conflicts and questions that surround drugs today. I’m very proud to say that the finished product achieves that vision.