An adjunct assistant professor in English in Manhattan and Brooklyn Heights, I've been getting my extracurricular kicks from the so-called "genres" ― mainly because the genres are where the best new writing now can be found ― including Patrick O'Brian's Aubrey/Maturin sea saga, Michael Dibdin's and Michael Connelly's detective mysteries and Alan Furst's historical spy novels. Alexander McCall Smith's serial novels have helped draw me deeply into all things Scottish. My poetry reading finds me in a Yeats' phase, one of many happy returns; I am rereading the latest translations of Dostoevsky's Demons (a.k.a., The Possessed; a.k.a. The Devils) and Bulgakov's The Master and Margarita.
Current projects: shopping a new book of poems.
Academic work has been a relatively recent development. I've worked as a cattle farm caretaker in West Virginia, a carpenter's apprentice with the New York Stagehands Union, Local 1, and as a journalist in Washington, D.C., to name a few occupations. My life outside academe is enriched by bird watching with an expert, my wife Gae, and I still get to garden periodically at my mother's home in North Jersey. I like to swim and canoe (once an Eagle Scout) and eat barbecued ribs, especially in the South Carolina Low Country.
A graduate of The University of Virginia, Charlottesville, I took my M.F.A. in creative writing (with high honors) at Brooklyn College, where I was the editor of Brooklyn Review and a member of Allen Ginsberg's last graduate poetry seminar.
Publications
Poetry collections
The UFOs of October (Lincoln, NE, May 2003: iUniverse. Paper, ISBN 0-595-28070-6; Adobe eBook, ISBN 0-595-74724-8).
Nine from Metronome (New York, 1995: Pisces Press. ISBN 1-887638-05-9).
Nectar (San Francisco, 1991: The Norton Coker Press. ISBN 1-879457-27-X).
Cubesteak Canapes (El Paso, Texas, 1990: Vergin Press).
River Edge, 1959 (Washington, D.C., 1989: loco*motive press).
No Repose (Washington, D.C., 1989: loco*motive press).
Non-fiction
Essays, feature articles, reports and reviews published in The Iconoclast blog, America Magazine, The Washington Review, The Washington Book Review, The Washington Tribune, Washington Dossier, Washington Weekly, The Wall Street Journal, Inquiry, GW Times, The Texas Mercury, Training & Development Journal, Enter Stage Right, Bull-Head, Room Temperature, Sniper Logic, Exquisite Corpse, Spintech Magazine, The Vocabula Review, and Thus Spake the Corpse Anthology. Letters in The New York Sun, The New York Times, The Washington Post, Harper's Magazine, Vanity Fair Magazine, etc.
Poetry
Poems published in Americas Review, The Ampersand, Aphros, Art in Las Vegas, Big City Lit Online, Big Scream, Blind Date, Bouillabaisse, Brooklyn Review, Bull-Head, Can We Have Our Ball Back, Carbuncle, Chiff & Fipple, Degrees of Apprenticeship, Enter Stage Right, Exquisite Corpse, Four-I’s, Giants Play Well in the Drizzle, GRIST On-line, Gypsy, Impetus, Half Dozen of the Others, Heel Tap, House Organ, Jejune: america eats its young, Journal of New Jersey Poets , Little Green Footballs, Louisiana Review, Lungful!, Mad Dog Press, Mail&Guardian magazine, New English Review, Nexus, NRO Weekend, The 9/11 Digital Archive, One Trick Pony, Oxalis, Perspectives, The Plastic Tower, Poetry Motel, Quick Brown Fox, Real Living Anthology (Summer 2002, Popular Press), Riverrun, Room Temperature, A Small Victory, Sniper Logic, Stone Soup Poetry Gazette, Sunflowers & Locomotives Anthology, Thoroughbred Times Magazine, Thus Spake the Corpse Anthology, Viva Las Vegas, The Wall Street Journal online, WPFW-fm Poetry Anthology, Will Work for Peace Anthology, and Xenophilia.