Hi my name is Joe, and I'm an author...

Ever notice how introducing yourself as an author is kind of like going to an AA meeting? I mean, we're all addicts to writing, right? My story isn't unlike many of yours. Just a city boy, born and raised in south...no wait wasn't both in Detriot. I am originally from Oklahoma but have lived in Texas for the majority of my life. I came to be an author purely by accident. I wasn't looking for it, it just kind of happened. I was a graduate student at the University of Dallas and I took a class on the Civil War. As a grad student, I had to write a 20-page research paper on a topic of my choice. I chose to write about American Indians in the Civil War. A year later I decided to attempt to publish another work I had written as an undergrad but it wasn't something anyone wanted. So I floated the Civil War paper to an American Indian magazine and the rest they say is history. A year after that, I was contacted by a university press interested in seeing if I had ever considered turning that article into a book. Five years later and they backed out because they felt it too similar to another work by Mary Jane Warde called, When the Wolf Came: The Civil War and the Indian Territory. Thankfully the editor helped a brother out and recommended it to McFarland & Company, Inc., Publishers.

Now I'm stuck in that weird spot in an author's life. I've published two essays and a book. So where do I go from here? A while back I had a chance encounter with a fellow scholar from Germany. His name is Mischa Honeck and his work, We Are the Revolutionists: German-Speaking Immigrants and American Abolitionists after 1848. I have another paper I'm working on and then I plan to leave behind American Indian studies and the Civil War for greener pastures. I consider myself an American History scholar who happens to have published in American Studies, Civil War history, and military history. Other historians I admire, Joseph J. Ellis, Dan Jones, Jill Lepore, among others.