Charlie Lovett was born in 1962, shortly before the Cuban Missile Crisis, an event for which he disavows all responsibility. He suffered in early childhood from an older brother and sister who enjoyed subjecting him to what they appropriately called “tickle torture.” Charlie has nearly recovered from the emotional damage and is thinking about forgiving his siblings in the next few years.

Charlie entered Summit School in 1966, and hasn’t been able to find his way out since. He is currently Writer-in-Residence at Summit and has recently published Onward and Upward, a 75th anniversay history of the school. This was his first coffee table book, which he actually has a copy of sitting on his coffee table. Charlie’s love of drama began in the first grade when he played the role of the Gingerbread Boy. The New York Times said, on the occasion of the premiere, “Cloudy tomorrow with a 40% chance of rain.” Charlie has ignored the critics ever since.

Charlie went on to play the title role in Tom Sawyer in fourth grade, a part his father said he had been rehearsing for all his life. Other roles at Summit included the lead in Rumplestiltskin, the Badger in Toad of Toad Hall, and his unforgettable turn as Bad Bart Banana Peel in his second grade play (though his part was unforgettable, he has completely forgotten the name of the play.)

In 1977 Charlie entered Woodberry Forest School and began a serious career as a long distance runner. After three years of high school he had been unable to outrun his passion for the theatre, so he spent four years at Davidson College studying theatre. He acted in dramas, comedies, musicals and children’s plays. During college Charlie also wrote two plays, which have thankfully remained hidden at the bottom of a box of old papers ever since. He directed three plays and graduated with a degree in theatre and absolutely no prospects of gameful employment.

After a careful study of career options, Charlie chose antiquarian bookselling (a narrow victor over air traffic controller and toll booth attendant). With his first wife, Stephanie, Charlie operated Lovett & Lovett Booksellers (which he foolishly forgot to declare a non-profit entity) in Winston-Salem. Soon he was volunteering on the stage of Summit School once again. In the late 1980s, Charlie began to publish scholarship on Lewis Carroll, drawn partly from his massive collection of Carroll items, which he continues to assemble. He has since published five books on Lewis Carroll yet Carroll refuses to return the favor—he has published NO books about Charlie Lovett.

After a move to Kansas in the early 1990s, Charlie rediscovered his passion for the theatre, playing such roles as Feste in Twelfth Night, Brabantio in Othello, and the lead role of the Duke in Measure for Measure. Charlie later discovered that these plays were all written by the same person, a William Shakespeare who somehow managed to become a playwright without ever having played the role of Bad Bart Banana Peel.

In January of 1997, Charlie received his M.F.A. in Writing from Vermont College in Montpelier Vermont. Unfortunately, it was so cold at the time that the diploma was presented to Charlie’s cryogenically frozen body. After thawing out in England for six months with his wife, Janice, and stepdaughter, Jordan, Charlie returned to America and prepared for a move back to Winston-Salem. Jordan entered Summit School as a sixth grader the year that Charlie’s daughter Lucy began the first grade there. Within days Charlie and Janice were helping out with the sixth grade play.

In 2001, Janice was offered the job of third grade drama specialist at Summit. She had all the talents necessary to wrangle 60+ third graders and train them to perform a Broadway-quality masterpiece. All she lacked was a Broadway-quality masterpiece. To fill this need, Charlie shamelessly stole several of Janice’s ideas and wrote the script for Twinderella—his first children’s play. He has since written Twelve other plays for performance at Summit in both the third grade and the junior high. Eleven of his plays have been published and more are on the way. His plays have been performed across the country and around the world.

For those publishers out there who happen to be reading this, in addition to his twelve published books, Charlie has written two other novels: one will rightly remained buried in the same box with his college plays, the other is a bestselling literary mystery waiting for a publisher to realize its potential. His published works are detailed elsewhere, but his yet-to-be-published works also include a brilliant sequel to A Christmas Carol written in the style of Charles Dickens (who, Charlie later discovered, actually wrote the original story as well).

Charlie continues to write and act. He has recently played roles such as the Duke in Big River and Marcellus in The Music Man. He is puzzled by this, since both these characters are tenors and he is a bass, but hey, that’s acting. His rendition of “Shipoopi” in The Music Man will be remembered by all who saw it—many of them are still in therapy because of the nightmares.

Charlie’s novel The Program, published in May 2008, will no doubt take the country by storm. Or maybe that’s just another hurricane . . .

With Jordan out of college, Lucy about to go into college, Janice continuing to act and direct, and his dog Sophie asleep on the couch, Charlie believes the best parts of this biography are yet to come!