Mine began in Orcutt, California, where I grew up scribbling stories in the doodle-crowded corners of my Yu-Gi-Oh! notebook for my friends and I to play out during recess. Books, movies, video games, I devoured just about any form of storytelling I could get my hands on. That obsession with stories eventually led to me studying Creative Writing at San Francisco State University where I got my first taste of professional writing, editorial, and production working at literary magazines Transfer Magazine and ZYZZYVA.

All of this would come full-circle when I helped localize and edit some of my all-time favorite stories like Pokémon, Naruto, My Hero Academia, and more as an editorial intern at the world’s largest English language publisher of Japanese manga, VIZ Media. After learning everything I could about what made some of the biggest stories stories succeed at VIZ, I was honored to bring that experience forward and serve more than half a decade at webcomics and novel publisher, Tapas Entertainment. My first role at Tapas began with leading our localization department, building our production systems and managing a team of 65+ translators, typesetters, quality control editors to publish over 150+ comics as localization manager. In between these duties, I also edited and produced multiple original comics and novels which would eventually grow into my new role as senior production manager, helping found and build our award winning original comics studio at Tapas.

My mission to help create the best stories possible would continue in my next role at Storygrounds. Storygrounds was an ambitious webcomic startup blending the best of episodic vertical storytelling with community features that enabled fans to directly impact their favorite stories such as submitting ideas for a new character or voting on the direction of a plot twist. As lead creative producer, alongside our small but fierce team, I helped build our creative pipeline from the ground up. I crafted our editorial and content guidelines, managed production schedules to ensure projects were completed on time and on budget, developed story bibles, pitches, vision boards, characters and worlds, assembled creative teams, and collaborated with high-profile creators to transform their unique voices and ideas into original stories.

Along the way, I was lucky enough to craft a few stories of my own, writing and producing an official comic adaptation of SNK Corporation’s The Last Blade video game series and adapting SEGA and Netflix’s Sonic Prime into comics for IDW Entertainment. In all my roles, however, my greatest passion has always been working as close as possible to the creative process. Above all, I love getting my hands dirty and diving deep into the trenches to help creative teams of writers, artists, and beyond bring their stories to life.

Today I still scribble those stories, striving to help people, projects, companies, and creators of all kinds make their own. Whether it’s comics, novels, movies, video games, whatever form a story takes, I am always pursuing better storytelling and asking the same question: how can I help your story?