I was born in southern Indiana in October of 1957, the same month the Russians launched Sputnik. I attended elementary school in Terre Haute, where I joined the Safety Patrol, read science fiction in the school library, and won a prize in a poetry contest (thus determining my future). When I was 12 my family moved to a suburb of Kalamazoo, Michigan, in a rolling landscape of abandoned farm fields dotted with two-hundred-year-old bur oaks, underneath turbulent northern skies.  In Junior High I asked for the Selected Poems of Dylan Thomas for Christmas and wore a green sweater vest (under the impression that this was artistic). I bought Elton John albums, discussed God in my church youth group, and was generally confused and hopeful. After high school I went to Northwestern University, where I majored in anthropology (because it seemed scientific) and minored in creative writing (because that was what I really wanted to do). After college I worked as a security guard, a handyman, a cigar salesman, a stringer for a local newspaper, and eventually as a writer for a pharmaceutical company. But the urge to write poetry proved unsurmountable. I earned a poetry MFA from Western Michigan University and went on to study at Boston University. Upon receiving a Ph.D. in American literature (my thesis was on Emerson), I taught for four years in Chicago; in 1999 I accepted a position at Winona State University, where I taught English and creative writing for 24 years. I still live in Winona with my wife, Laura. I help run the Maria W. Faust Sonnet Contest and play guitar in the Bell House Band.

I am the author of Monument in a Summer Hat (New Issues Press 1999) and Blue Lash (Milkweed editions 2006), and co-author with Kim Chapman of Nature, Culture and Two Friends Talking (North Star Press 2015). My latest book of poems, Empire (Shipwreckt Books), debuted in the summer of 2023.