I was raised by prolific readers. When I was growing up in south Florida in the 70s and 80s my parents, both artists, always had a book on them.  They read everything. They taught me to love stories and how to see the world and draw what I saw.  It seemed like a logical step to my elementary school self, to start writing and illustrating my own stories.  I would scribble them down in spiral notebooks then dictate them to my grandmother (another aspiring writer) while she typed them up.  The older I got though, and the more I read, the more I realized I was a lot better at the picture part than the word part.  By the time I was in high school I’d stopped writing for fun and knew my future was somewhere in the visual arts.

I escaped Florida for Rhode Island where I studied jewelry and metalsmithing at RISD.  After graduating I headed for New York looking for my big break.  It only took 7 years there to become an overnight success.  In 2001 my sister Courtney and I started our fine jewelry collection, Philip Crangi Jewelry – Philip is my given name but it is also my dad’s so I was Beau growing up, it’s how I have always thought of myself.  The following year we launched Giles & Brother, a lower priced collection.  And we did get pretty successful.  We were in the best stores, won some big fashion awards, got to work with some really talented people, had our picture in magazines, went to too many parties.  I was lucky, with jewelry design and metal working I had found my voice for the first time.

Flash forward to 2023.  By then I was living between Paris and New York with my partner Darren, I’d closed my company and had designed for Tiffany, Hermes and Louis Vuitton and was currently working for the Bali based company John Hardy.  It was on a work trip to Bali that I saw the first spark of the story that became THIS WORLD’S ALL OURS.  It started with a game I’ve played since I was a kid, whenever I’m thousands of miles from home: what would happen if the world ended while I was there? Throw in some Queer coming-of-age angst, a sexy love story and a lot of blood thirsty action and I had my first novel.  I talked it over with Darren and started writing on a flight to Marrakech.  The story came easily but I still had a hard time making the transition from the visual to the written so I went back to my roots and illustrated the book as I wrote it.  I had no intention of trying to tackle writing a graphic novel – my skills as an illustrator aren't what they used to be – but I found that the pictures helped me find the words to describe the world I wanted to build.

With three novels completed in the series and a fourth underway I think I’ve found a new voice, the one I've been looking for my whole life.