About the Author
by admin on October 24, 2009

E. J. Knapp was born during a thunderstorm in Detroit, Michigan several years before the Motor City discovered fins. Three days after his somewhat clamorous birth, his mom and dad gave him the first and middle name which he never uses, while his long lost uncle, appearing, drunk, out of nowhere, gave him the nick-name (Skipper) which has been, in various forms, with him since, and then promptly disappeared again (the uncle, not the nick-name), ultimately to die in Utah, of all places.

EJ was raised in a working-class, blue-collar neighborhood where he discovered the joy of kissing girls at an early age. Passing swiftly through puberty, he morphed into the stereotypical hoodlum that a teenager growing up on the west side of Detroit was expected to be: Grease slicked hair with waterfall and duck-tail ala Elvis, white shirt with black pegged pants beneath a London Fog trench coat and pointed Tom McCann shoes with shit-kicker heels. After skipping more days of his first two months of High School than he attended, his despairing father sent him to live with his mother in a little hick town in Florida. The last thing he remembers upon leaving Detroit is watching the Soupy Sales show and walking over to the Warren G. Harding Elementary/Junior High School to tell them that President Kennedy had been shot.

Five months after arriving in Florida, he was declared persona non grata by the local authorities and promptly sent home to his father in Detroit where, as a full fledged teen-ager, he took to ten-inch switch blades, bike-chain belts, the proper assembly of zip-guns in shop class, rumbles, beer drinking, heavy petting in the park and juvenile delinquency in such a lack-luster way that he was finally forced to drop out of high school and hit the road, which he’s been doing ever since. Hitting the road, that is, not dropping out of high school.  Once was enough of that.

Throughout his life he has been a paper boy, a bagger in a grocery store, a roofer, a forestry ranger trainee, an auto mechanic, a factory worker, a long haul trucker, a professional college student, a peer counselor in a street clinic, a drug dealer, an ice cream truck driver, an audio/visual technician, a professional photographer and the IT manager for a San Francisco law firm.

He has published several short stories in obscure on-line magazines, most of which no longer exist, though he insists this is not his fault. He is also the author of a non-fiction work, The Great Golden Gate Bridge Trivia Book – not his idea for the greatest title in the world – published by Chronicle Books in 1987

Stealing The Marbles is his first published novel.

Currently he is back in the armpit of Florida, in the flood zone of the Suwanee River, hunkered down with his six cats and the inevitable strays that seem to gather wherever he settles.

If you care to contact him, knock yourself out on the form below.  If you’re not trying to sell him something or sue him and the cats are all fed and he can find his way out of the jungle, he’ll probably get back to you.

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