Born in Fresno to an artist mother and math teacher father, Colton’s life is a series of surprises. At 6 he learns crime doesn’t pay when he gets caught stealing a marble from a toy store. At 17 he gets fired from his first job before his first shift. A shoulder injury ends his college baseball career, so he splits town for San Diego State and flunks all classes except poetry. After failed modeling audition, Colton walks into a ballroom dance studio and four months later he’s teaching the Hustle. At performing arts school, he dreams of Broadway. To pay for voice lessons, he steals cars as a General Motors repo man but gets fired after three accidents in the company car. He auditions for international tour and spends two years performing in Europe and South America. First job in Hollywood: Janet Jackson’s “Nasty” video. In Space Mutiny, Colton is cast as Colton and the film is called “quite possibly the worst science fiction/space adventure film made in English.” He gets rejected at audition for new soap opera character, then suffers identity theft when new character is introduced as Colton. He plays a suspect singing hip-hop on Cop Rock, “TV’s first and last musical police drama, deemed so eccentric or downright bad that it remains a part of the collective pop-culture consciousness.” He leaves Hollywood for Toronto, London and NYC. He performs on Broadway in Kiss of the Spider Woman, Chronicle of a Death Foretold and Ragtime. Due to clerical error, Colton is credited in the film Blue in the Face as “the actress Cotton Green.” Back in school Colton finishes his B.A. at Marymount Manhattan College. In the school newspaper he writes “Cracks Across America” about falling pants. He wins the M.M.C. Honors Colloquium Award for best literary essay. At Columbia University, he earns an M.A. in teaching English. He teaches on the Lower East Side, in Harlem and the Bronx. During the pandemic, Colton teaches from his kitchen table and completes an M.F.A. in Writing at Lindenwood University. His two favorite stories are sons Curtis and Pearce.