Biography

In the Fall of 2000, the editors of the weekly Composition Program newsletter at the University of Louisville (my alma mater on the Ph.D. level) wrote asking for a brief bio.  Here, slightly updated, is what I sent back.  Almost all of it is true. 

My 4th grade teacher made us read Misty of Chincoteague seventeen times before they came and took him away.  Despite this, I decided to become a writer and a teacher.  So before I got to Louisville I took a Master's in Poetry, drove carriage tours in my hometown of Charleston SC, taught in a maximum security prison, worked as a deejay and church janitor and first mate of an Erie Canal packet boat, plus about a dozen other jobs. This is what's called, I guess, developing a writer's resume.

Came to Louisville in 1993, and am slowly recovering. While I was there I sort of played both ends against the middle, figuring out (eventually) basically what teaching writing was about, hanging out in the local poetry scene, playing softball. I believe I still hold the record for weight gained in the two months just prior to comps.

In September of '97 I moved to Lawton, Oklahoma as an Assistant Professor at Cameron University, and I quickly became my department's designated hitter, teaching a bunch of things that weren't strictly in my bailiwick: Literary Nonfiction, English Linguistics, Grammar.  Also got funding to start a small press, publishing Southwest Oklahoma poets.  After two years in Oklahoma, and a year as a Visiting Assistant Professor at Shippensburg University, I'm now an Assistant Professor at Bloomsburg University of Pennsylvania, teaching Composition, Technical Writing, Writing in the Professions, Theory and Practice of Writing, and running the University Writing Center. I'm in the process of revising my dissertation for publication, and finishing a narrative poem I started way back in 1992.  For fun, I obsess about baseball, work out (whimpering softly and halfway ignoring the stifled laughter of 19-year-olds around me), comfort the disturbed, disturb the comfortable, write, cook, and do environmental work. I have one dog, Mowgli the Codependent, and two cats, Walter the Velcro and Thalia the Loud.

 

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