I've had a camera in my hand since I was 12 years old. Born in Selma, Alabama, where my father was an officer at Craig Air Force Base, I grew up in Los Angeles and went to school with a surprising number of movie stars' kids. I studied religion at Harvard University, where I wrote for the Crimson and received a bachelor's degree in 1975.
After graduation I worked as a reporter for the Long Beach Press-Telegram for five years. I covered cops, courts, city hall and all the usual journalistic suspects. I interviewed Bob Hope and Muhammed Ali and wrote about the Hillside Strangler case. In 1983 I started work as a feature writer at the Register-Guard in Eugene, Oregon, where I spend most of my time writing about art and artists.
My writing and photography have appeared in such diverse publications as Byte, Working Woman, Animal Sheltering, Oregon Birds, Oregon Quarterly, Portland magazine, L.A. Stage Alliance and the Los Angeles Times. In 2006 I was a fellow at the National Endowment for the Arts' Journalism Institute for Theater and Musical Theater in Los Angeles. I live on 18 acres outside Creswell, Oregon, with my wife, Lisa Strycker. Our son, Noah Keefer Strycker, is a bird photographer, illustrator and writer.