Mark Andrew Bogdania

Mark Andrew Bogdania (nee Bogina) is a degreed scientist and author of several works ranging from applied research to poetry and historical fiction. He was born April 22, 1963 in Olathe, Kansas the youngest of four children. Raised in the Roman Catholic faith he attended parochial schools through the 12th grade. Upon graduating from St. Thomas Aquinas High School in 1981 where he was a three sport letterman and contributor to the school's newspaper and yearbook publications he entered Kansas State University in Manhattan, Kansas. During his time in "The Little Apple" he joined the Pi Kappa Alpha fraternity and pursued Bachelor's (1986) and Master's of Sciences (1989) in the Earth Sciences. Upon graduation he was employed with the U.S. Environmental Protection Agency (US EPA) as an environmental scientist focusing on health issues pertaining to abandoned lead and zinc tailings in the Tri-State Lead Belt in southwestern Missouri, southeastern Kansas and northeastern Oklahoma.
After his stint with the EPA he re-entered college, this time choosing to pursue a PhD in Science Education at the University of Kansas. He developed a love of poetry while serving as an National Science Foundation (NSF) Science Fellow in the Kansas City, Kansas Public School District (USD #500) where he employed haiku writing as an applied form of learning assessment within middle school science lesson plans. He left the University of Kansas prior to completing his dissertation and began work on his first novel The Amazing Double-Life of Marcus Pivo: Lviving with Agent Orange (2008). Utilizing his knowledge and prior experience with the EPA the novel is a roman-a-clef work of historical fiction focusing on how a contamination release, in this case dioxin derived from the manufacture of Agent Orange, from one part of the world could cause geo-political mayhem in another distant portion of this ever shrinking planet.

He has further demonstrated his love of the haiku in Jump Joint & Other Scribbles (2009) a collection of poems, sonnets and haiku that provide "a deep reflection of the inner workings of the onion bulb." He quickly followed that initial poetic effort with Australia, Haiku'd Adventures in Oz (2009), a photo-log with accompanying haiku of his experiences working the harvest trails of eastern Australia in the Fall of 2006.
He and his beagle Snoopy are said to live an amazingly normal life on the shores of Lake Michigan in Chicago, Illinois.

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