Mark's career as a CIA analyst garnered him eighteen (18) Exceptional Performance Awards and the Director of National Intelligence's 2007 Galileo Award for innovation in intelligence analysis. Click here to read his Galileo-winning co-authored paper.

Mark holds a bachelor's degree in Political Science (BYU '95) and master's degrees in Business Administration (BYU Marriott School of Management) and International Relations (BYU Kennedy Center for International and Area Studies '99). He is a graduate of the Sherman Kent School's Advanced Analyst Program.

Mark is a native of the great Commonwealth of Virginia, where he resides with his family. Having grown up surrounded by Jamestown, Colonial Williamsburg, Monticello, Mount Vernon, and an astonishing number of Civil War battlefields, he has an abiding passion for 18th and 19th century US history and gives the occasional tour of the Antietam and Gettysburg battlefields (neither in VA, but two of the few places for which Mark is willing to leave the state). Mark also plays tabletop war games, programs computers, studies the culinary arts, and listens to far more Bruce Hornsby music than is healthy.

Mark writes his novels using a MacBook 13" and Scrivener.