About

Background

I grew up in New York, came of age in the suburbs, and spent a chaotic but formative stretch in the early 1970s at Ripon College in Wisconsin — where I learned more from the Racine girls and a Midwestern winter than from anything on a syllabus. When Dean Harris sent me home, I landed in Tribeca, working for a Scandinavian food importer — first in the warehouse unloading trailers of cheese and other goods, and then as a salesman traveling up and down the East Coast for six years. Those years proved my father right. His constant advice had been to get a college education, and I finally took it. I enrolled at Baruch College as a freshman, was mentored by the English department faculty, changed my major from Business to English and Journalism, and with their support went on to an MFA at Brooklyn College and then the doctoral program in English at the CUNY Graduate School. I went on to serve as Dean of Humanities, Arts and Social Sciences at four universities — the University of Washington-Tacoma, Montclair State University, Northern Arizona University, and Eastern Washington University. I retired to San Diego, where the canyon coyotes and the Pacific have been doing most of the teaching since.

Writing

Poetry found me late, or I found it — the distinction feels less important the older I get. I began writing poems in 2020, most of them in response to prompts from the editors at poetsonline.org, where nearly all of them first appeared. The prompts turned out to be exactly the right constraint: they sent me somewhere I wouldn’t have gone on my own, and what I found there was usually something I hadn’t known I was carrying. Memory, family, place, literature, and the ordinary comedy of getting older keep showing up whether I invite them or not.

Recognition

Two poems — After the Burial and Unlike Cicadas — were nominated for Best of the Net. The Paper Fortune Teller was nominated for a Pushcart Prize. The Unbearable Beauty of Ballet appeared in Cathexis North West Press in 2025. Hand-me-downs is forthcoming from Skyfreight Publishing House, and Observation Day will appear in LIPS Magazine, published by the Laura Boss Foundation, in summer 2026. The rest have found their home at poetsonline.org.

Books

Seven books spanning American literature, literary ecology, learning systems, technology and innovation management, and memoir — including an academic memoir about how an aimless hippie ended up spending a life in school. See the Books page for details.

Now

I live in San Diego, where I am retired, still writing, and still occasionally surprised by what a poem will do if you let it.