Michael Hallford, born in 1959 in Texas, was the eldest of five children. His parents were both the descendants of some of the first American settlers in Texas, their ancestors having come on the first wagon trains from Missouri in the 1840s. Related by blood and marriage to some of the notable figures in Texas history, among them Davy Crockett, John Bridger, and Lyndon Johnson, he was raised in modest means, neither his parents, nor his grandparents were college educated. He was able through diligence and inborn intelligence to win a four year scholarship to Rice University where he studied biochemistry for two years, and then to his parents’ disapproval, switched to English Literature. He wanted to write, and he read as many of the classics as his mind could absorb. Upon graduation, unable to find a writing position, he took a job as a claims examiner for an insurance company, a position he has held in various companies since graduating in 1983. He is married to a wonderful woman named Victoria and has four beautiful children, the youngest of whom is autistic. In 1998, he was ordained a deacon in a traditionalist Greek Orthodox church in Astoria New York and he was ordained to the priesthood in January 2004, and now serves as an assistant priest in an emigrant parish in New York City.
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