The son of two dancers who divorced when he was one year old, Ethan spent formative time in SoHo in New York City, in the Midwest, and in the South. As a child, he felt a preternatural call to language. He wrote poems and novels on the dance studio floor while his parents worked. It is perhaps not surprising that he eventually expressed this passion through theater, and that his texts possess a strong physicality.

Ethan began writing plays at a very young age, and found immediate success. He was a finalist three years in a row in the Dramatists Guild of America’s Young Playwrights Festival, and his play The Making of a Modern Man was staged at the Public Theater in New York, starring Fisher Stevens, Blair Brown, Richard Jordan, and Greg Germann, when he was sixteen.

Ethan attended Yale University, where he studied English and Drama. At Yale, he produced four original plays, sometimes also directing and acting. He went on to produce plays in Paris, New York, and regionally in the South.

In his twenties, Ethan moved to Edisto Island, off the coast of South Carolina, where he helped raise two sons and spent twenty years writing the epic literary work Far Cry, which he finished while living with his family in Northumberland, UK. He went on to gather two volumes of poetry, Sutras from the Sea and Sutras on the Mountain, and to revisit the playwriting of his youth with Ex Nihilo.

Ethan lives in Asheville, NC.