I'm currently the Film and Media Studies and Librarian at Emory University in Atlanta. Although my primary passion and expertise is film history—especially Soviet and post-Soviet cinema—I also love literature, music and other arts in their various lofty and base manifestations. I received a Ph.D. from the Graduate Institute of Liberal Arts at Emory University in 2005, with a certificate in Film Studies. My dissertation was on the Soviet film director Sergei Parajanov (1924-1990), who is admired throughout the world for his remarkable visual style and his creative use of local folklore and traditional cultures. (His name is also commonly spelled Paradjanov.) His four major films are: Shadows of Forgotten Ancestors (Ukraine, 1964), The Color of Pomegranates (1969), The Legend of the Surami Fortress (Georgia, 1985) and Ashik-Kerib (Georgia/Azerbaijan, 1988). Work on the project included archival research and interviews in Armenia, Georgia, Russia and Ukraine. Before emigrating to the Southeast, I lived in Las Vegas for over twenty years. My scattered observations on that city somehow ended up as a novel.