Oakland L. Childers grew up wanting to be a rock star, but found, after starring in a handful of less-than-stellar bands, he was much better at writing about music than actually performing it. After lettering in journalism in high school (something that gets you far less dates than, say, a football letter), his path seemed clear. Hopes of rock stardom dashed, he crawled to his computer, began clicking away at the keyboard and hasn’t stopped for about 15 years now. Along the way Oakland managed to pull enough credits together to graduate with a degree in History and Journalism from the University of Delaware where he lived with other journalism students and worked at the Review, the schools award-winning newspaper. He wrote for and was editor of the Review’s features and entertainment sections. During his years at UD, Oakland also held down a news internship at the Newark Post, a local weekly paper, and another at Fridge Magazine in New York City, a short 3-hour bus ride away. He also worked nights as a telemarketer selling another local paper, breaking some sort of record for the most publications any one person has worked for at one time. After college Oakland packed up his stuff and moved to Colorado with his wife-to-be, Melissa, where he landed a job as a reporter and entertainment writer at the Colorado Daily in Boulder. In a short time he took over as features and entertainment editor of the paper, a job he held for about four years. During that time he wrote like a crazy person, both for the Daily and a number of magazines. In 2002, Oakland and Melissa got hitched and once again packed up, this time landing in beautiful Fairhope, Alabama on the Gulf of Mexico where Oakland is a reporter for the Fairhope Courier Newspaper. He continues to freelance for the Colorado Daily, as well as several magazines including Thrasher and Rockpile. Oakland has done just about every job there is to do at a newspaper, from selling ads to editing stories, working in the pressroom and managing freelancers. He is a die-hard advocate of print media. He eats paper and bleeds ink. The boxes upon boxes of clips in his attic are proof that Oakland lives to write.