666 5th Ave

Canadian American poet, novelist, and visual artist, Simon Occulis was born Brandon Pitts in Los Angeles, California. His teenage years were spent in a US Manhattan Project town, Richland Washington, where the military made the plutonium for the Nagasaki bomb, and his high school mascot was the mushroom cloud. After flunking out of school as a result of dyslexia, he embarked upon a long list of factotum occupations: arctic fisherman, coffee roaster, radio-jingle producer, and single parent, to name a few. After a best-selling poetry collection, Tender in the Age of Fury, and two international recital tours under his birth name, he published a novel, The Gospel of Now, which is being adapted into a motion picture. As a visual artist, he has had solo exhibitions in Toronto and Montreal and his art can be found in public institutions and private collections. Occulis lives in Montreal, Canada.