Biography of Leon Chase

Leon Chase grew up 20 miles south of Detroit in a place called Riverview, Michigan (where, incidentally, there is no view of the river.) The town is part of the larger sprawl of industrial suburbs known collectively as "Downriver," an area notorious for its noxious concentration of steel mills, auto factories, chemical plants, refineries, sewage treatment plants, nuclear power plants, former missile silos, abandoned salt mines, toxic waste dumps, and fishing. The Last Carburetor was Chase's first full-length play, and was published as part of Martin Denton's Plays and Playwrights 2003. Chase also wrote the book, music, and lyrics for Temp!, a musical comedy about office workers. A scene from this musical, which he directed, was produced by San Francisco's Popcorn Anti-Theater in January 2000. He holds a degree in written communications from Eastern Michigan University, and his story "Acetylene" won second place in the San Francisco Bay Guardian's 1997 Summer Fiction Contest. He has also penned various comics and pop-culture articles for small publications over the years. He is the co-founder of "Don't Come Knockin'" (www.rockinvan.com), a Web site celebrating custom-van culture, as well as creator and proprietor of Brooklyn Country (www.brooklyncountry.com), an online celebration of New York City's surprisingly fertile country music scene. Since the publication of The Last Carburetor, Chase has written four more plays but, as of this writing, has deemed none of them "good enough" to produce. He now lives in Brooklyn, New York, where in his daytime hours he "gets paid to fix robotic things that light up" and, at night, he fronts the garage honky-tonk band Uncle Leon and the Alibis (www.uncleleon.com). He is currently at work on a full-length novel.