About Lou

A child of Wildwood, NJ, I picked up an undergraduate degree from Temple University…then things got less linear.

While working full-time as a Philadelphia-based magazine journalist, I spent nearly ten years as a professional stand up comic and, for two of those years, ran a children’s theater company. You may have seen me for 14 seconds on “America’s Funniest People.”

I phased out the stand-up work when publishers took an interest in my books, which have collectively sold more than a million-and-a-half copies. They include “The High Impact Infidelity Diet: A Novel” (Random House–optioned by Warner Bros), “Creative Block” (Running Press), “Kid Culture” (Cider Mill Press), “The Encyclopedia of Guilty Pleasures” (Quirk Books) and the novelization of “Santa Claus Conquers the Martians” (Penguin). About 40 books published so far.

(To be honest, the one that sold most of those copies was “The Voodoo Kit” (Running Press) but it’s still a pretty impressive number, don’t you think?)

Journalism work continued when my family and I relocated to Indianapolis, leading to my role as founding editor/co-creator of the award-winning, ground-breaking, I’m-still-stinking-proud-of-it Indy Men’s Magazine where I had the honor of working with such writers as Dan Barden, David Gerrold, Todd Tobias, and Michael Kun. The demise of IMM led to the best job in the city of Indianapolis–my most recent position as Arts & Entertainment Editor for the Indianapolis Business Journal and IBJ.com/arts.  Now I’m freelancing, still writing for IBJ but also for Indianapolis Monthly and other publications.

A board member of the American Theatre Critics Association, I chair its New Play Committee, which administers the Steinberg and Osborn awards. I was thrilled to be a part of the USC/Annenberg Engine 28 and Engine 31 pop-up newsroom projects and was honored with a Creative Renewal Grant from the Arts Council of Indianapolis.

That grant helped push my play writing into a higher gear. My staged work includes “Midwestern Hemisphere” (premiered by Heartland Actors Repertory Theatre), “Lightning and Jellyfish” and “Clutter: Or, the Moving Walkway Will Soon Be Coming to an End” (both premiered at Theatre on the Square) and the long-running hit live auction comedy “Going…Going…Gone.”

Most recently, I developed “We Are Still Tornadoes” at Butler University Theatre, where it opened the 18/19 season.

But enough about me…