I spent more than 30 years working for Mother Jones magazine, mainly as communications director, before retiring in 2010. I am also a writer and professional French horn player. My writing—mainly about coffee, food, or music—has appeared in the New York Times, San Francisco Chronicle, Salon, Saveur, Gourmet, Imbibe, the coffee trade journal Fresh Cup, and elsewhere.
In October 2011 I posted a website devoted to Shig Murao, the City Lights clerk who was arrested in 1957 for selling a copy of Alan Ginsberg's Howl to an undercover San Francisco policeman. In the trial that followed his arrest, Murao and City Lights publisher Lawrence Ferlinghetti were exonerated and Howl was deemed protected under the First Amendment.
