From associate professor of English to management trainer to retiree, I’ve journeyed from New Jersey through California to Oregon to discover Douglas firs, months of rain, and dry summers. After years of writing academic papers and business books, I’ve realized that poetry is the way my mind interacts with the world – in images, rhythms, sounds, and intensities of language. So I’ve settled into the joyful challenge of translating experience into as few words as possible. My aesthetic is embodied in Jack Kerouac’s comment in Dharma Bums: “One day I will find the right words, and they will be simple,” and in Galway Kinnell’s statement, “To me, poetry is somebody standing up … and saying, with as little concealment as possible, what it is for him or her to be on earth at this moment.”
My poems attempt to be simple in words as they grapple with the complexity of being on earth right now.
My poems and book reviews have appeared in more than 200 publications throughout North America, Australia, and the UK. The Poetry Box released my first chapbook, Nothing More to Lose, in December 2020 and my fifth collection, The Catalog of Small Contentments, in August 2021. My second chapbook, It’s in the Cards, was released in April 2023 by Kelsay Books. I currently serve as the book review editor for the Oregon Poetry Association.