I am Richard Dana Thomas Llewellyn (to give my full name). The Llewellyn bit comes from my Welch ancestry. Llewellyn was the name of the last true Prince of Wales but as far as I know my family was down in a Wales coal pit for years before my great grandfather was recruited to the United States to go down into a Pennsylvania coal pit. Apparently he preferred the home variety more and returned to Wales, leaving behind my grandfather and nine siblings. My grandfather later went to the mountains of western Massachusetts. My father left those mountains before World War II. After the war he came south to North Carolina.

I was born in Raleigh, North Carolina but have lived in New York, Texas, Georgia, and Iowa. And there were the two years I was in Ankara, Turkey.... (Note to my curious friends: it was basically comic book collecting, visiting archaeological sites, etc. (with their connections to drug running and counterfeiting, naturally). And the Texas time was spent in a Catholic seminary ....

I received my Master's of Science in Library Science degree from the University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill. I came to Iowa State University in September 1999. Before then I had worked at the University of Georgia, North Carolina State University, the University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill, and Western Carolina University. If you want all the gory details of my professional life take a look at my resume.

I'm a major league couch potato. My current major hobby interests are animation (go here for my real webpages) and manga (Japanese comics). My favorite sports are automobile racing (the real thing, not NASCAR's glorified versions of merry-go-rounds), skiing (snow, I used to do water many moons ago), and golf (but never have the time to take out my clubs).

Photograph from the Atlanta Constitution, Nov 7, 1994.