About.

Al is a musician, photographer, and writer who is insatiably curious, fiercely independent, skeptical, analytical, often irreverent, impatient of sacred cows and generally suspicious of power.

Born in Baltimore, MD in 1968, and raised in Overlea by his grandparents, Albert and Elizabeth, Al attended the McDonogh School on scholarship, where he was an honor student and lettered in track. In his senior year, he was an editor of the school’s literary magazine. He graduated in 1986.

Eager to explore another part of the country, he matriculated at Macalester College, a small liberal arts college in St. Paul, MN, in the Fall of 1987, where he studied English with an emphasis in creative writing. Reflecting on his time in Minnesota, Al says, “the people were some of the nicest I’ve met, and the winters were interesting…Well, the first winter was interesting. Still, there’s something to be said for a place where you can keep your beer cold in the space between the inner and outer panes of a window and where people don’t rush to the supermarket to stock up on bread, milk and toilet paper every time there’s a threat of snow.”

“To be yourself in a world that is constantly trying to make you something else is the greatest accomplishment.”

—Ralph Waldo Emerson

After college, Al found work in retail management with Toys ‘r’ Us, and over the next several years, worked at a number of stores around the Baltimore metropolitan area before moving on to work as an associate manager for Barnes & Noble.

In August of 1991, Al enlisted in the U.S. Army Reserve. He did his basic training at Ft. Jackson, SC, and his advanced individual training at the U.S. Army Signal School at Ft. Gordon, GA, before returning home to serve as a Software Analyst in a personnel services company at Ft. Meade. He was honorably discharged in 1999.

In the mid-nineties, Al studied philosophy as a Basselin Scholar at Theological College, The National Seminary of The Catholic University of America, while discerning a vocation to the Roman Catholic priesthood in the Archdiocese of Baltimore. Though he would ultimately decide not to become a priest, his stint in the seminary did leave him with one indelible memory—he and his fellow seminarians had the honor of meeting Pope John Paul II and serving mass for him before a capacity crowd at Camden Yards as part of the Pontiff’s historic visit to Baltimore in October of 1995.

After leaving the seminary, Al took a job as a proposal writer for a regional dental insurance carrier headquartered in Towson, MD, where he worked for a decade before taking a position with the country’s largest health insurer in 2007. Today, he continues to support himself through his work in marketing.

He moved to Harford County, MD in 2005, and now resides in Abingdon.

“Life isn’t about finding yourself or finding anything, life is about creating yourself.”

—Bob Dylan

His favorite writers are Emerson, Orwell and Hemingway. He’s also fond of Sherwood Anderson and hopes one day to follow his example and escape the clutches of commerce to pursue his creative passions. Preferably without the attendant nervous breakdown.

Al believes, like Plato, that philosophy is a way of life—the love of wisdom— not an academic exercise. And he’s been studying Classical Greek and Latin in order to read their work in the original languages.