Thomas McKenzie (Mac to his friends) graduated from Milton Hershey School as a journeyman printer before enlisting in the Navy as a Mineman at the end of the Cold War, where he specialized in underwater weapon systems and received a free cultural education in Scotland, Sicily, and Spain.

After enlisting in the Coast Guard as a Public Affairs Specialist and working his first case in Dutch Harbor, Alaska (Selendang Ayu, 2004) he earned his way into the Service’s response community and deployed for Hurricane Katrina and the BP Deepwater Horizon Gulf oil spill, among others. Mac then landed his dream assignment – PIAT (Public Information Assist Team), a deployable four-person disaster response component of the National Strike Force where he became Incident Command System (ICS) Type 1 PIO qualified.

He spent four intense years responding to and overseeing crisis communications as a first responder for major disasters: Hurricanes Harvey and Maria, the Refugio Beach oil spill, a railcar explosion (Mount Carbon, West Virginia), two shipwrecks, a magnesium fire, a jet fuel spill, and an Ebola threat aboard a cruise ship to name a few. He partnered with and trained representatives from oil, pipeline and cruise ship industries as well as FEMA, EPA, NOAA, U.S. Fish and Wildlife, and federal, state and local law enforcement and first responders.

He logged more than 100 hours teaching emergency crisis and risk communications, basic media interaction, and the ICS Joint Information Center model to members of the national response community as well as public information officers from various branches of the Department of Defense. Somewhere along the way, he found time to self-publish a science-fiction novel.

Retiring from the military in 2018, he accepted a position on Amazon Web Services’ product launch team helping developers release new products in machine learning and artificial intelligence before returning to college full-time to chase his dream of being a science fiction author. He’s currently pursuing a Bachelor in Fine Arts in Creative Writing from George Mason University and working on a handful of novel and novella projects.

Mac has played Dungeons & Dragons with the same party since 2018 and has survived Tomb of Annihilation, Curse of Strahd, Icewind Dale: Rime of the Frost Maiden, Call of the Netherdeep, and Wild Beyond the Witchlight and finally managed to reach level 12 in Ingress. He’s lived in nine states, been a bartender, a telemarketer for Highlights for Children magazine, the lead photographer for the Department of Homeland Security, and quoted verbatim in newspapers nationwide.