Tim Cummings has a distinct memory of sitting at a picnic table beneath a colossal oak in his backyard in Port Jefferson, New York, scribbling furiously beneath a sunny sky in a classic marbled Composition notebook. He was incredibly young, maybe four years old; this was before preschool. And in his mind, even though he could not yet even form written words or sentences, he was definitely inscribing his first novel. Weird.
That love of words, of writing, manifested soon thereafter in a lifelong obsession with books and reading. Every possible book written for children—by Beverly Cleary, Ruth Chew, Virginia Hamilton, Roald Dahl, E.B. White, Judy Blume, Madeleine L’ Engle, Mildred D. Taylor, the Choose Your Own Adventure books—was deftly devoured and re-devoured throughout his childhood and teenage years.
A professional performer since childhood, Tim attended New York University’s Tisch School of the Arts and earned his BFA in Acting. He has worked steadily in theatre, film, television, commercials, dance, voice-over, animation, and new media since. He is the recipient of three LA Drama Critics Circle Awards for his work on the stages of Los Angeles.
Never ceasing in his passion for reading and writing, however, he earned his MFA in Writing for Young People from Antioch University Los Angeles. Recent publications include F(r)iction, Scare Street, Lunch Ticket, Meow Meow Pow Pow, From Whispers to Roars, and Critical Read, for which he won their ‘Origins’ essay contest and also received a Pushcart Prize nomination for his essay, “You Have Changed Me Forever.” A regular contributor at Los Angeles Review of Books (LARB), he writes features, reviews, and interviews. He runs several writing workshops per year, does manuscript consulting, and individual writing coaching. Tim is represented by Charlie Olsen at Inkwell Management. www.timcummings.ink
Regal House is proud to be publishing Tim’s novel, Alice the Cat in the summer of 2023.
