I was born and raised in Honolulu. I attended Punahou School and also UH-Manoa. I spent every summer with my grandmother on her horse ranch on the east end of Moloka’i. She gave me my first horse when I was four. That mare dropped a foal the morning after I “rode her to death,” according my grandmother. My father told his mother to never mention I had Hawaiian blood because of the discrimination he experienced as a boy growing up in Honolulu.
I bounced around during my college years, attending the University of Colorado, the University of Hawaii, and UC-San Diego. I received a BA in English Lit at UCSD and went on for my MFA at San Francisco State University. While at SFSU, I was the first student in the history of the school to sweep the poetry awards in the all-school competitions.
