About
Writer, editor, and teacher, with twenty years of training people behind the poems.
Many of my poems live in rural places: farm auctions, prairie cemeteries, the weeks before harvest. I studied English and Creative Writing at the University of Iowa, where I was placed in the Graduate Writers’ Workshop poetry course and the Graduate Poetry Seminar, and I received the Iowa Chapbook Prize in Nonfiction. I went on to earn a Master of Liberal Arts in Creative Writing and Literature from Harvard University Extension School. My thesis, Good Friday, is a researched work of narrative nonfiction about a true crime.
Editing
At Iowa I served as Alumni Editor for INK Literary Magazine, where I ran a team of genre readers, chose work across poetry, fiction, nonfiction, drama, and visual art, and line-edited accepted pieces before publication. I also read poetry submissions for The Iowa Review. Reading a few hundred submissions teaches you quickly what makes an editor stop reading, and that is most of what I pass on to writers.
Teaching and training
Long before I studied poetry, I trained people. Over two decades in engineering and manufacturing I ran national sales training for a new blast-resistant window line, taught estimators to read blast-rating guidelines, and built a glazing company whose branch managers in Colorado and Georgia learned to run their offices without me. At Harvard I supported formal and technical writing for a School of Public Health course and mentored graduate students on their writing. Most recently I mentored engineers at an applied AI lab I founded. Across all of it, I teach the “why” before the “how,” so that people can make good decisions when I’m not in the room.
Recovery writing
Since 2024 I’ve been building 60 Sonnets for Addiction Recovery, a sequence of Shakespearean sonnets that follows the twelve steps, with companion workbooks and a Practitioner Guide for counselors. The program has grown to include haiku, letter poems, gratitude poems, and memoir essays, and I’ve led workshops with treatment facilities and counselors.
Elsewhere
I’m a member of the North Carolina and Colorado Poetry Societies. I make paper by hand, cut woodblocks and linoleum for printing, and shoot both film and digital photographs. I’ve traveled to fifteen countries and forty-eight states, and I live in the Boston area.
Get in touch about a project, a workshop, or a reading.