Birthplace?
Fullerton, CA

Hobbies?
charcoal/pastel sketching, British teas, long walks at the pond, swimming, Barbershop singing, doing laundry

Favorite Movies?
Tokyo Monogatari, Cinema Paradiso, Midnight Cowboy, Dancer in the Dark, Disney's animated Robin Hood, Underground, Noi Albi­noi

Dog or Cat?
Equipose, but leaning toward the feline preference these days

A Quote?
"And they who were dancing were thought insane by those who could not hear the music." -- Nietzsche, TSZ

The Five Books You'd Have on the Desert Island?
1. Jude the Obscure
2. Sons & Lovers
3. Betrand Russell's History of Western Philosophy
4. The illustrated Larousse Gastronomique
5. a good, hefty dictionary.

One Person, Living or Dead, You'd Want to Meet?
Philip K. Dick

The former led him to discover he loved music. The latter led his mother to discover, when her son kept drawing pictures of people with greenish-yellow flesh, that Mark was colorblind. Bidding farewell to a career as a portrait artist, he picked up the trumpet at age 10. Two years later he began studying with David Washburn, principal trumpet of the Los Angeles Chamber Orchestra.

In 1998 he matriculated at USC on the school's Presidential scholarship, studying with Boyde Hood of the Los Angeles Philharmonic. After receiving his music B.A. in 2002, he moved overseas to Oxford and worked, read a lot, wrote a little, and snuck into Oxford University classes.

When he returned to the US in 2003, Mark rented a cozy attic in a cheery home and worked variously as a math tutor, construction worker, office manager, and hotel night watchman.

In 2004 Mark began his M.A. studies in English Literature at Boston College, where he conducted archival research at Harvard and Yale and participated in the Radcliffe Graduate Consortium for Women's Studies. In 2005, he founded New Comm Ave, a literary journal for first-year college writing. He also joined filmmaking forces with Emre Safak, co-founding an independent film company, Olive Barrel Productions, where three of his screenplays are in various stages of production.

Mark now teaches writing at Fullerton College and Irvine Valley College while spending his free time making artsy fartsy t-shirt art and recording melancholy music.